Variegated Meadowhawk

Yes. Most North Louisiana dragonflies wrapped up the flight season by September, but the variegated meadowhawk (Sympetrum corruptum) just arrived. A dragonfly flying over a North Louisiana pond in late October belonged to one of very few candidates, and the variegated meadowhawk sat at the top of that short list. North Louisiana received variegated meadowhawks as fall migrants and occasional winter visitors rather than as year-round breeding residents.

American kestrels caught variegated meadowhawks at fall field-edge perches using the same sallying technique the kestrel used on grasshoppers. A kestrel on a utility wire above a November pasture picked off perching meadowhawks from the weed tips below, and the meadowhawk's field-edge habitat put the dragonfly in the kestrel's primary hunting zone during the months when both the kestrel and the meadowhawk occupied the same open-country habitat. Loggerhead shrikes caught variegated meadowhawks from fence posts and open perches and sometimes impaled the dragonfly on barbed wire alongside the grasshoppers, lizards, and other prey items the shrike cached. A variegated meadowhawk impaled on a barbed-wire fence in a Bossier Parish pasture in November joined the shrike's larder without the meadowhawk earning any special treatment or any exemption from the barbed-wire filing system.

The shorter window compressed every adult behavior into the warmest hours, and a meadowhawk that spent too long warming up on a borderline day lost feeding time that the fast-warming individual gained. Sallying flights from the perch caught gnats, midges, and other small flying insects with the standard perch-launch-grab-return technique. The fall insect supply ran thinner than the summer supply at the same sites, and the variegated meadowhawk fed on whatever the late-season air held without the prey diversity the summer dragonflies enjoyed.

Roosting and the November Night

Variegated meadowhawks roosted in low vegetation at field edges after the afternoon's flight activity ended, perching on grass stems, weed tips, and dead plant stalks near the ground with the body pressed close to the stem for wind protection. A roosting meadowhawk at a Bossier Parish field edge at 5 p.m. in November sat motionless on a dead aster stem six inches above the ground, completely exposed to overnight temperatures that dropped into the 30s without any behavioral option beyond tolerating the cold.

The cold tolerance that let the meadowhawk fly at 55 degrees during the day also let the meadowhawk survive overnight temperatures below freezing at the roost, and a variegated meadowhawk that survived a 28-degree November night at a North Louisiana field edge woke up the next morning with frost on the wings, waited for the sun to warm the body past 55 degrees, and resumed patrolling as though the night never happened.

Frost tolerance sat unmatched by any summer dragonfly in the region, and the meadowhawk's ability to survive freezing nights explained why the flight season extended into December in mild years when the daytime temperatures between freezes still reached the 55-degree flight threshold.

Hard freezes that persisted for multiple days killed variegated meadowhawks that the single-night freezes did not, and a December cold snap that held temperatures below freezing for three consecutive days ended the flight season at every site the cold reached. A meadowhawk population that survived five isolated overnight freezes in November died during the three-day freeze in December, and the multi-day cold exposure exceeded the cold tolerance the single-night recovery allowed.