By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
Heavy rain, like what we received Thursday night and Friday morning, spurs lots of activity in nature.
One of the areas I like to visit after a good rain is the slough that runs along the southwest side of Del Rio Lions Park off Fox Drive on the city’s north side. I’ve started walking the track in Lions Park again as often as I can, and I noticed Friday afternoon that several inches of water had collected in the slough adjacent to the track.
Lions Park itself is in the ephemeral drainage of Cienegas Creek. The north end of the creek’s drainage winds through the Del Rio Hedges area east of Highway 90/Veterans Boulevard, down through the open acreage north of Walmart, under the highway north of Brown Automotive Center, over Amistad Boulevard and into Lions Park and is typically dry.
In times of very heavy rainfall – four to six inches – this drainage becomes a creek once more. Rarely, such as during the Flood of 1998, it becomes a river.
I visited the Lions Park slough Saturday morning, carefully picking my way along a number of good-sized puddles.
A variety of odonates – dragonflies and damselflies – were drawn to the water. As the larger dragonflies cruised the air above the ponds, the smaller damselflies mostly perched on grass stalks and twigs at the edges of the ponds.
There were a number of familiar dragons I had encountered in other areas of the city – Black and Red Saddlebags, Wandering Gliders, Variegated Meadowhawks, even a pair of Common Green Darners.
I was also fortunate enough to find a dragonfly species I had never seen anywhere else in the city, a Twelve-spotted Skimmer. These large, strikingly marked dragonflies are fairly common throughout Texas and the rest of the country; I had just never seen one in Del Rio.
I was able to find and photograph both the male and female of the species and decided to call it a day.
On Sunday morning, I returned to sit beside the shrinking ponds and see what else might be seen.
About half an hour into my visit, I caught a glimpse of a very small damselfly called a Citrine Forktail. This little flier is no longer than my thumbnail, between 0.8 and 1.1 inches from tip to tail, and I’d only see it once before, several years ago, in this same area.
The little damselfly was extremely hard to track, and I was never able to get a photograph of it, so now I will have to wait for the next big rain to check the slough again.
—
Contact the author at delriomagnoliafan@gmail.com
