Book updates and targeted image search

Dave McShaffrey, Jim McCormac, and myself (MaLisa) are still chugging along with new new all Ohio Field Guide to Dragonflies and Damselflies (official title TBD). We are getting close with the text and have sorted through most species for photos.

Thank you to those who have submitted photo permission forms! We have been picking out at least two candidate images per sex for each species known to occur in Ohio. Then our publisher will decide between those images of which one we actually end up using. I will then need to follow up with photographers to get the original image file for each selected image, so that will take some time. As of right now, I have not informed anyone if their image is a candidate for a particular species, so if you already submitted images for species not on the list, don’t worry.

One challenge we have run into is that our field guide is supposed to cover all species that have historically been found in Ohio. However, there are a lot of species that we have not seen in recent years, or we see mostly males, or we only have one or two blurry images. Thus, we are putting out an additional targeted species request for publication quality images of the following taxa: Google Sheets List of Requested Odonata

We have also added in a short wish list at the end of the list of species we think might be found in Ohio, but have not yet been documented. So this can be your challenge to either A) find and document them in Ohio (and then we would need to write a full species profile for them, but I won’t complain), or B) submit your photo records from travels outside of Ohio. In general, preference will be for images taken from Ohio, but we know that just is not feasible for many of these species.

-MaLisa Spring