SOME SPECIES MIGRATE to warmer wintering grounds, and oh, how deftly they do fly—whether on their way south, or on the hunt for supper, or perhaps to meet up with that someone special, and mate in mid-air. But I’m not talking about some feathered creature with a mere single set of wings; I’m talking about dragonflies—as I did in a radio segment and podcast with a leading American expert on the subject, zoologist, Princeton Field Guide author and photographer Dennis Paulson. Share in the four-winged wonder.
UNTIL I MET Dennis Paulson, thanks to the series I’ve been doing with the BirdNote public-radio program he contributes to, I was probably your average dragonfly semi-observer: I knew what they were, but had never really looked too closely.
I quickly ordered the Eastern version of Dennis’s two-volume Princeton Field Guide to dragonflies and damselflies. Before I’d even reached the 336 species-by-species accounts that start on page 49, many of them illustrated with Dennis’s photos, everything in the way I looked at these insects had changed. Already, I was paying better attention and have been able to distinguish four distinct species in the garden, and counting.
Ph.D. zoologist Dennis Paulson is also a keen gardener, and an expert on birds. He directed the Slater Museum of Natural History at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, until retiring in 2004.
“I started with birds, as so many people do,” he says of his interest in nature and science, “and I got interested in everything along the way—insects and flowers and snakes and fish. At one point I was casting around for a Ph.D. dissertation, and realized I didn’t know as much about dragonflies as I would have liked to. I’ve sort of been studying them ever
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