Rescue

Thing 1 and I engaged in a water rescue operation this afternoon. A green darner dragonfly was clutching the edge of the pool cover, unable to get itself out of the pool due to surface tension on the water plus a pretty stiff breeze. We managed to fish it out--miraculously, without either of us falling into the pool--but it was too wet to fly. I was afraid one of the resident pigeons would eat it for dinner, and everytime we tred putting it down somewhere, the wind started carrying it back toward the pool. So we put the dragonfly in amongst my rather overgrown lemon verbena, where I hope it was able to hang on, dry off, rest up, and continue its buggy existence.

The side benefit of all of this to us was that we got a really close view of a gorgeous animal, and I even managed to get a few decent pictures. That's a water shoe liner it's hanging onto in the picture on the left. You definitely should click on the picture for a closeup view.