This photographic guide to Europe’s dragonflies is amazing, although WILDGuides have built up such a reputation for producing high quality books of this sort that it doesn’t come as a surprise really. But it is still amazing.
Now, I have to confess that my knowledge of odonata is miniscule so the book could be riddled with errors for all I know but I am confident that it isn’t. Let’s assume it isn’t and just look at it as a book. What a book!
The book mainly consists of 2-page species accounts for all 140 species regularly or rarely found in Europe. The right hand page is photographic portraits of the species – usually at least four but sometimes as many as 10 – and these cover both genders, colour morphs and races, and often have enlarged images of particularly useful identification features. They are a superb collection of images, attractively arranged but very instructive in showing identification features. I suspect that one would only realise how brilliant the photographs were when one started to creep up on the species in the field, book in hand, to try to see the necessary field characters and found the blooming thing rather uncooperative. The left hand page has a handy, legible range map, a photo of typical habitat for the species, some text on behaviour, identification and habitat, information on flight period and sometimes some more images to aid identification. It is a marvel of concise clear information transfer.
The damselflies in particular are very obliging in being long and thin, and sitting with their wings closed along their backs – that form and that habit make them easier to arrange on the page. But do look at the way that the photographs are displayed on each right hand page – there is some very clever and attractive design on show here.
This book is published on 14 July at peak odonata time – that’s handy. I wonder what species I might fnd in my garden this summer – I’ll let you know.
Europe’s Dragonflies: a field guide to the damselflies and dragonflies by Dave Smallshire and Andy Swash is published by Princeton University Press on 14 July.
Remarkable Birds by Mark Avery is published by Thames and Hudson – for reviews see here.
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All these books are brilliant and I see no reason why this should not be as good as those already published or indeed the same authors one on this group in the UK.
Having been to Bulgaria last year looking at this group among others no doubt this would have been a very useful addition to ones luggage. For myself I like both artwork and photographic guides they sort of complement each other. Oddly I prefer solely artwork for birds, except may be raptors.
Dragons and damsels aren’t that hard Mark and there are not that many in the UK to get a grip of ( not like moths!)
Convincing review Mark, thanks. This appears to be available now from Blackwell’s (paperback, published April 2020) and NHBS (“flexibound”, published May 2020) at least. Same ISBN as detailed on the Princeton website. Do you know of any difference in the July publishing?
Kim – thanks. That’s interesting. No I don’t.