Most of the subjects in this gallery are Black Saddlebags. Red Saddlebags are wanderers, much less
common here -- I have never seen them breeding at any of our ponds. The Bay Area is at the extreme
north end of the Red's range; Blacks are common throughout the state. In 2020 a number of Red's
showed up at Emily Renzel Wetlands Preserve in Palo Alto, not seen in subsequent years.

Black Saddlebags are an interesting species. Males are very active all day, rarely resting
until late in the afternoon. Their thoraxes are extremely dark and alien-looking. The "bags" are
more than coloration, but exactly what, it's hard to say. The male's cerci are oddly threadlike;
the face is almost all black. Males fly weeks before females show up; where the females forage and
come to maturity I do not know. The only time I see solo females is at the end of the flight
season, when the last males are gone.

Their ovipositing style is unusual in that after mating the pair flies around in tandem -- that
part is standard -- but instead of dipping and splashing or dropping off eggs, in this species the
male momentarily releases the female -- she drops, splashes off an egg (or several), then within a
fraction of a second he seizes her again and they fly off, repeating this sequence once or twice a
minute for an hour or more.

The main difference between the genders is the yellow on the top of the abdomen; the female has three
yellow segments, the male just one, and that may be faint, but sometimes hers aren't prominent either.