A small but colorful damselfly

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Another thing I found at the Mueller prairie restoration on August 28th was this small but colorful damselfly. I wasn’t exactly sedulous in my attempts to identify it, though it looks as if it could* be Argia sedula, known as the blue-ringed dancer. But in the end I let it go—the identification, that is; the damselfly was always free.

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* Have you noticed the recent proliferation of the phrase could possibly? The word could already means ‘has the possibility to,’ so could possibly is redundant; it stretches the compact Anglo-Saxon could from one syllable to four, three of them unnecessary.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman