OhioDragonfly] Book updates and other news

Hi Everyone,

I hope you are doing alright despite the pandemic and recent chaos across the nation. I hope you can stay safe and well.

May was slow for dragonflies this year, with not a lot flying in part due to several weeks of rain and odd periods of cool temperatures. However, a lot of species have been starting to fly and be reported in the last week, so there are dragonflies out!

I haven't been able to get out much due to a combination of weather, sheltering in place, and work restrictions (meaning I can only look for dragonflies on personal time). I was fortunate to get a very brief break in the woods recently and encountered a Twin spotted Spiketail male , Arrowhead  Spiketail female , and an Ashy clubtail male. What species of dragonflies can you find in a woods near you?

Searching for dragonflies during the era of COVID-19:
The Ohio Odonata Society plans to continue encouraging use of iNaturalist to acquire county records. As such, looking for dragonflies near you is still encouraged, at least in locations where you can be physically distant from others. At this point in time, it is not recommended going very far from your normal home location to reduce the risk of spreading the virus. Hopefully, things will get better as the summer progresses, but there are no guarantees.  To see the current trends in cases of COVID-19 in Ohio, see: https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/dashboards

Book Updates - Select images still needed:
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. 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 for certain groups. See our list and additional info on our blog here: https://u.osu.edu/ohioodonatasurvey/2020/05/29/book-updates-and-targeted-image-search/

Ohio Dragonfly Conference:
The 2020 Ohio Dragonfly Conference has been postponed until 2021. (And our 2021 conference plans have also been pushed back to 2022). The locations should be the same, but the dates are still TBD.

Ohio Odonata Society Membership:
Following a discussion with the Ohio Odonata Society board, we have decided to freeze memberships and board positions for the 2020 year. So if you were a member last year, that will carry forward to this year. A newsletter is in the works, so hopefully that will carry over once my paid position ends in less than a month. If you would like to contribute a piece for the newsletter, please email either myself or Kyle Bailey (kbailey@richlandcountyoh.us).

Upcoming events:
Everything has been cancelled or postponed. However, we have many of our presentations from previous events on the resources page of our website here: https://u.osu.edu/ohioodonatasurvey/identification-resources/ 

Best wishes,
MaLisa

Posted on June 1, 2020 09:36 PM by malisaspring malisaspring

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