Caught...

I felt something. I had just walked up the front stairs and something brushed against me. I thought it was an errant clematis vine, but when I turned around there was nothing there. My second thought was ... spider? I looked again, but not expecting to find this:

All I could think of was... Can a spider eat a dragonfly? I thought surely it was dead. Unlocked the door, went inside, grabbed the cell phone to take a picture. When I went back out, it was moving its legs... or what I would rather think of as arms...  It was alive. You'd think that the stress of its body pulling on its wing stuck to the web would have caused too much damage. I carefully pinched off about ten inches of the web strand and was trying to get a decent photo with the wind blowing, whilst trying to figure out a safe place to set it down.

As I was nearing the back porch, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, another red dragonfly flying nearby, and found the perfect spot. I gently placed it down on a pine cone in an unused planter, held down the web as close as I could to the wing and pulled the rest of the sticky stringy part off.  A little bit of the goo was still stuck to the end of its wing, but it should be fine.

I don't believe that I've ever seen a Red Dragonfly before...  and it had come to my door.