Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #613408 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 308 pages

Synopsis
This text includes the entire European fauna, comprising 124 species of damselfly (Zyboptera) and dragonfly (Anisoptera), all illustrated in the 219 colour figures showing, in most cases, both sexes as well as important variants - all enlarged.

Customer Reviews

STUNNING
Updated from the original rather large hardback, this now smaller version in softback is simply fantastic. It's just small enough to take into the field and the colour plates are very bright, sharp and well executed by R.R.Askew. The keys are first class and the maps also very good. Overall the best guide to the regions Dragonflies. What would be nice is a companion photographic guide to cover Europe.

More for the serious researcher
Comprehensively detailed and covering all European species, the text and black and white illustrations of this book are aimed more at laboratory examinations than to be used as a field guide and more akin to a heavyweight textbook. The colour illustrations are adequate, but for Odonata hunting in Great Britain I found "Field Guide to the Dragonflies and Damselflies of Great Britain and Ireland" illustrated by Richard Lewington to be far more useful. To me, Lewingtons illustrations are brighter, clearer and together with the text make for ready identification.

Not ideal as a field guide, but contains useful information.
Perhaps best regarded as a manual rather than a field guide. The revised softback edition has been updated to include ten new species now breeding in Europe, including one species newly described to science.

The book contains initial keys which should enable identification to family, and family keys which then allow identifications to be taken to species level. Another key can be used to identify final instar larvae.

Many (but not all) species are illustrated in the 30 colour plates which, although good, are not to the same standard as those by Richard Lewington in the more recently published 'Field Guide to the Dragonflies of Britain and Europe'. Numerous line drawings illustrating wing venation, abdomenal appendages, genitalia etc. help to show important features for in hand identification of specimens.