A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
darner
A darner is a large dragonfly of the family Aeshnidae, the group that includes most of the biggest and strongest fliers. Darners have very long bodies, enormous eyes that meet across the top of the head, and the habit of patrolling a beat back and forth for hours. They can hover, fly backward, and take prey out of the air with a success rate above ninety percent, which is higher than almost any vertebrate predator manages.
Etymology
The name is short for devil’s darning needle, an old English and American folk name for dragonflies generally, from the long thin body and its resemblance to a needle. The folklore attached to it was that the insect would sew shut the lips or eyes of children who lied or swore. Similar stories run across Europe: the German teufelsnadel is a devil’s needle, and Swedish calls them the devil’s steelyard, said to be weighing your soul.
Notes
The common green darner is one of very few dragonflies that migrate, moving down the eastern United States in autumn in loose swarms that follow cold fronts, with the return north made by the next generation. Their larvae are among the top predators of any small pond and will take tadpoles and small fish.