It’s a calm afternoon on the Cuyahoga River near downtown Kent.  Museum naturalist Larry Rosche is by the water, watching a brilliant black and green insect, a damselfly –

“That female ebony jewelwing has been on that stick for an hour.  She’s putting eggs (on) perhaps in a wet spot in there. When the water comes up,  the branch goes in the water and the eggs come out.”

Rosche developed his love of nature on the ball field as an outfielder with plenty of time on his hands…

“When there’s a good pitcher, what are you going to do but look around? No one’s going to hit it.  I knew the birds a lot; I used to do drawings and stuff as a kid.”

Rosche learned bird identification, and later worked on the famous Peterson guide books, developing distribution maps not just for bird species but for butterflies, reptiles and trees. 

Then came a fascination with dragonflies, like the small red and gold one basking on a rock… 

“What I found out 15, 20 years ago is it’s fun to watch them --  even a species as common as the amberwing how it goes around trying to find the proper spot for the female to lay its eggs.  It’s really something to see.  It just never gets old for me.”

 “They’re named pretty well too.  Dragonflies don’t have the funny names like the birds do.  Eastern pondhawk, it’s a real predator.  It eats everything. Dashers and meadowhawks, and amberwings…If you have a fishless pond you can get the big green and red one called the comet darner.  They like that because the fish eat the nymphs.”

Young dragonflies are aquatic hunters, called nymphs…Rosche suddenly picks up his binoculars…

“Oh, there’s a fawn darner on the other side.”

Rosche says experience allows him to identify the winged blur zipping by.  For nearly a decade he and collaborators Judy Semroc and Linda Gilbert worked to produce a detailed guidebook to Northeast Ohio’s dragon- and damselflies, so that others can begin to learn the 140 species that live here.

Rosche says one of his favorites is also one of the rarest…

“The river jewelwing is probably the least common.  It’s on the endangered species list.  There’s probably 20 river jewelwings in all of Ohio, 20 individuals.”

It’s Rosche’s, and the other museum naturalists’ job to monitor the fragile habitats of rare animals like the river jewelwing.

But even common dragonflies can fascinate.  One of the biggest, and most widespread is the impressive green darner, harmless to humans, but lethal to mosquitoes.

“You know how mosquitoes come out, what do you think the dragonfly’s going to do?  ‘We’re having dinner!’  They fly real close to you; you can actually hear them go by you…”

Rosche says Green darners and many of the larger dragonflies are actually migratory.

“They’ve actually tagged them with electric, little radio things. On the East Coast, they’ve done a study and they can travel up to 110 miles in a single day.”

The life, death and ephemeral beauty of these insects is a source of inspiration for Rosche.

“The whole idea of a one-way migration, how noble. ‘Well I’m born in Alabama,  I’m going to die in Kent, Ohio.  I’m not coming back, but my kids will.’…Pretty cool.”

Larry Rosche is co-author of “Dragonflies and Damselflies of Northeast Ohio”, a guidebook published by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Exploradio, hunting dragons along the Cuyahoga River… and exploring science and innovation in Northeast Ohio.