This is the first Ebony Jewelwing I’ve ever seen here in Brooklyn.
They can be common elsewhere, but this is now the first record in iNaturalist and Odonata Central for Kings Co.
A male. Eating a small fly in this shot. He was patrolling a puddle in the Dell Water, which is mostly drained now and half-filled with plants.
This makes for eight damselfly species I’ve seen here in the urban wilds of Brooklyn: Familiar Bluet, Rambur’s Forktail, Eastern Forktail, Fragile Forktail, Citrine Forktail, Lilypad Forktail, Orange Bluet, and now Ebony Jewelwing.
On iNaturalist, Staten Island is the most Ebony be-Jewelwinged of the five boroughs. The Bronx, connected to the mainland of America, comes second. Manhattan has no reports and Queens one. Long Island — of which Brooklyn is the western-most part — has ’em.
So where did this one wander in from?
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This work by Matthew Wills is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Backyard and Beyond 
He’s gorgeous! Congratulations!
Gorgeous! How do you get these extreme close ups?
I sat on the edge of the sunken pond and leaned in, but the damselfly was still about five feet away, which, coincidently, is about where my telephoto kicks in.
Amazing to see one in Brooklyn! I saw one in my yard the other day.