🌊 Meet Your Coastal Neighbors™ Blog Series.

Original illustration created for Ready to ReHo™ by Corey Andrew Powell

🌊 Meet Your Coastal Neighbors™

Meet Your Coastal Neighbors™ celebrates the remarkable wildlife, botanicals, and maritime heritage that make Coastal Delaware unlike anywhere else. Each story invites you to slow down, look closer, and discover the fascinating neighbors that call this extraordinary coastline home.

If you’ve ever walked around a pond on a warm Delaware afternoon, you’ve probably noticed them.

Tiny flashes of blue.

Green.

Amber.

Sometimes metallic gold.

Hovering.

Zipping.

Changing direction in an instant.

Dragonflies are among the oldest creatures you’ll ever meet on the Delaware coast.

Incredibly, their ancestors were flying around the Earth more than 300 million years ago—long before dinosaurs appeared. Back then, some dragonflies had wingspans approaching two feet!

Thankfully, today’s dragonflies are much smaller… but no less impressive.

They’re extraordinary flyers, capable of hovering like helicopters, flying backward, and making split-second turns that would leave most pilots jealous.

They’re also voracious hunters.

A single dragonfly can eat hundreds of mosquitoes in one day, making them one of the best natural pest-control systems around.

So the next time one buzzes past your picnic…

You might want to thank it.

Did You Know?

Dragonflies have nearly 360-degree vision thanks to their enormous compound eyes, which contain thousands of tiny lenses.

Where Can You Spot One?

Dragonflies love calm water.

Look around:

·      Gordon’s Pond

·      Silver Lake

·      Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge

·      Freshwater marshes

·      Woodland ponds

·      Local nature preserves

Sunny afternoons are when they’re most active.

Why They’re Important

Dragonflies are excellent indicators of healthy wetlands because they depend on clean water to complete their life cycle.

Where dragonflies thrive…

Healthy ecosystems usually do too.

A Ready to ReHo Tip

Bring a camera with burst mode.

Dragonflies move incredibly fast, but when they pause on a reed or cattail, they create some of the most beautiful nature photographs you’ll capture all summer.

🎒 Ready to ReHo Weekend Mission

✔️ Visit a pond or marsh.

✔️ Count how many dragonfly colors you can spot.

✔️ Photograph one resting on a plant.

✔️ Listen to everything happening around the water.

Nature is rarely quiet.

Coming in Our Next Meet Your Coastal Neighbor…

Meet the Monarch Butterfly—the incredible traveler that returns to Coastal Delaware each year on one of nature's most remarkable migrations.

📖 Featured in The Delaware Coast, Illustrated

The Dragonfly is one of 31 original textile illustrations featured in The Delaware Coast, Illustrated—a forthcoming coffee table book celebrating the wildlife, botanicals, and maritime heritage of Delaware through original illustration and storytelling.

Stay Curious.

Stay Ready to ReHo™