The European Odonates(Dragonflies and Damselflies)

On this page, you can see what has changed with the latest updates:

4th of January, 2005
Q: More pics; will it never stop?!? (A: I surely hope it doesn't)

Pictures were added of trips to southern Belgium and northern France (Epitheca bimaculata and Leucorrhinia caudalis, both new to the Picture Gallery!) and Zuid-Limburg (Onychogomphus forcipatus forcipatus), as well as of some of my expeditions to increase my stock of shots of more common species like Sympetrum vulgatum, Sympetrum flaveolum, Sympetrum danae, Platycnemis pennipes, Ceriagrion tenellum, Lestes barbarus, Lestes viridis, etc.

The Download section was enriched by a wallpaper of Onychogomphus forcipatus forcipatus. That brings the number of wallpapers to 11, and they are all available in two resolutions too :-P

20th of January, 2004
Some more minor tweaking :-)

Deniss Reeves once more helped me out a great deal. He kindly sent me a list of common names of Australian odes, previously published as a supplement to the Australian Dragonfly Society's newsletter, "Austrolestes" (#4). Common names have now been added to all species in the Australian section of the Picture Gallery.

14th of January, 2004
Some minor tweaking

Deniss Reeves and Gunther Theischinger were able to identify both Australian 'Mystery Odes', a damselfly and a dragonfly, as Aciagrion fragilis and Nannophya australis, respectively. Thanks a lot for that!

5th of January, 2004
Even more photos, a new Download section, a new host, new styling and faster download times

Pictures from my winter (April to August 2003) spent Down-Under were added. Yes that's right: in Australia, you can find some active dragonflies even in mid winter!

More pictures of European species (like Coenagrion mercuriale) were added, mostly made during spring 2002 in the Netherlands and Belgium and during summer 2002 in Southern France.

I rescanned my 1999 upstate New York slides and made them 400x300 pixels, like most of the other pics. Also added some hi-res pictures to the section of Northamerican dragonflies and damselflies.

A download section was added. At the moment, you can download ten different wallpapers there, as well as two short .avi movies of a dragonfly larva demonstrating its labium. I intend to add new wallpapers every now and then, and make descriptions available of great dragonfly spotting locations, and maybe a screensaver. We'll see. Just make sure you check this section every now and then!!!

All of this site's lay-out is now managed by cascaded style sheets, which makes site maintenance much easier, cleans up html code and shortens download times.

The literature section and links section have been reformatted, cleaned of dead links and made more complete.

Descriptive pop-ups were added to the menu on the 'home' page.

2nd of November, 2001
More photos, a new FAQs section, a new host, new e-mail address

During July of this year, me and some friends of mine made a two-week trip to Southern France. We visited several locations at the rivers Lot, Tarn and Gardon, as well as some smaller streams, and found 33 species and subspecies alltogether, 9 of which were new for me. As usual, I made loads of slides, the very best of which I scanned and now present in the Picture Gallery.

During past years, loads of people mailed questions to me. I tried to answer as much and as soon as I could, but started to realize that many people asked the same questions. I collected these questions and decided to make a FAQ list out of that collection. So, new on this site: the FAQs section! Access this section by clicking the "FAQ" button at thetop of the page (or the link in the previous sentence). If you have a question, please read the FAQs. If the answer isn't in it, feel free to mail me!

Crosswinds once again "lost" my files. For the third time. Again they said it was one of those chances of one-in-a-billion: loosing both the original files and the back-ups. Statistically it's nearly impossible that a one-in-a-billion event happens, let alone three times. I suspect the guys at Crosswinds make a mess of their back-up system, or don't have any. The worst part is that the services Crosswinds offers has greatly diminished. First, they introduced those pesky pop-up ads (while they used to promise that would NEVER happen!) and then they restricted ftp use to paying members only (but as they make such a mess of their services I'm definitely NOT going to pay!!! And I'm NOT going to upload all those hundreds of files one by one by way of a webbased form which is nearly ever accessible!!! Not when I know I might have to do it all again next week.) I decided to end my account at their server. It took a while to find a new host. A friend of mine, Toon, kindly offered to host this site on his private server. Thanks a lot!!!

My e-mail address changed to dragonflies@europe.com. Appropriate, isn't it!

The dragonfly sitering panel is back on my site. It's on the "Home" page. It's an easy way to find other dragonfly related sites. Check them out after you've seen this site thoroughly!

29th of May, 2001

This site is back on-line and up-to-date once again, after having been absent for quite a time. So, Turkish pictures and new European ones added and stuff.

12th of September, 2000

Nope, no new pictures for a change. Just added my site to the new Odonate SiteRing. The SiteRing navigation pannel can be found by choosing "Home" from the menu above and then scrolling down.

17th of August, 2000

Another load of new pictures was added to the picture gallery, this time mostly of a two-weeks trip to Turkey I made together with ten other Dutch guys during the end of may 2000. We saw 48 species (which is about all the species we could see in that area during that time of the year) and I was able to make pictures of 35 of those. Some species were downright spectacular: check out, for instance, the pics of Onychogomphus flexuosus, Onychogomphus forcipatus albotibialis, Lindenia tetraphylla, Trithemis annulata, Epallage fatime and more... Also added: some pictures of an emerging Aeshna isosceles (in my bedroom) and some improved pictures of species I already had in the gallery. Some of the hitherto nameless Asian dragonflies (like Paragomphus reinwardtii) got their names (thanx to some people who helped me find those names: thank you!!!). Apart from the picture gallery, nothing changed. But hey, isn't it enough already? The gallery features almost 350 pictures now!!!

New feature in the Picture Gallery: high-resolution pictures (800x600 or 600x800 pixels). Some photos are just worth beeing LARGE. In the left column of the Picture Gallery, links to pictures of which high-res versions are available, are marked with this symbol: Follow the link and at the bottom of the next page you'll find a link to the high-resolution image. So, you just go to the pictures as you always do and then have the choice to click further to the high-res pics. Or don't. You don't HAVE to. If you're a bit dumb, don't. Your choice. But you'll regret it. Don't say I didn't warn you if, later on, you can't sleep because you didn't look. It seems a bit complicated but I'm really just trying to be democratic. No, really! (What are you doing man! Hey, I don't need a shrink! Aaaaaaarrrgghl!)

TIP: If you like the Turkish dragonfly pictures, you just HAVE TO check out for the website of the Eastern Mediterranean dragonflies we're making: http://fly.to/epallage It features checklists with (even more) Turkish dragonfly pictures (by a lot of people, not just me) linked to the species, articles and more.

13th of December, 1999

Finally time and opportunity to scan my American dragonfly slides!!! They are available NOW in the picture gallery, so go check them out. I also scanned a lot of European dragonfly slides and they too can now be found on the picture gallery. Scanned slides tend to be better than scanned photos: more detail and stuff. Let me know whether you like 'em or not. I scanned my slides in higher resolutions than I did my photos, so pictures are larger and might download slower... But quite a lot of you complained that the pictures should be larger, so I hope you don't care about the download time!

Of the European pictures, especially check out the close-ups of Crocothemis erythraea, Orthetrum cancellatum, Ischnura elegans and Enallagma cyathigerum!

New feature in the picture gallery: links (in the left frame) to new pictures are marked with this icon: This way it's easier for you to find changes.

All in all, the picture gallery now features about 250 photos!

Some pictures have been added to some of the chapters of the "About dragonflies" section: a spider eating a male Enallagma cyathigerum (Enemies and threats), a pinned Anax imperator and a box with 235 exuviae of Aeshna cyanea (Photographing, catching & collecting).

30th of November, 1999

After having been absent from the net for almost two weeks, due to server problems at Crosswinds.net (who host this site, check them out!), I'm back again. Not much changed, except that I decided to remove the on-site search engine. It wasn't really working well with frames, so I thought I'd better get rid of it.
Okay, the "few weeks" you have to wait for the American pictures turned out to be months. I still haven't had the opportunity to scan my slides. Rumors say that I will have that opportunity soon, so keep checking this site out!

6th of September, 1999
Again, it took a long time before I could start updating. But this time, it's a MAJOR update. Even more MAJOR than all previous updates TOGETHER! I mean, it's
MAJOR!

So, what's new? EVERYTHING!!! Virtually everything! This website has been completely rebuilt. The lay-out, frameset, navigational structure and much more were completely redesigned. Pictures were rescanned and texts rewritten. Even the URL of this site changed: the site has MOVED!!! On the old spot, at Fortunecity.com, you'll be redirected to the new location: Crosswinds.net. Of course, the redirect URL http://fly.to/dragonflies is still the same!

new subjects

Sections about "Anatomy of odonate larvae", "Photographing, catching, collecting" and "Raising odonate larvae" were added at the "About dragonflies" chapter. Lots of text to read, which will be illustrated by some neat pics and drawings during next update.

The picture gallery keeps growing steadily. All existing pictures have been rescanned to improve their quality. Some new pics have been added already (like the one of the Gomphid I photographed on Java. Who helps me find the name???). More information on the indiviual species has been added to each picture.

DRAGONFLY CONGRESS OF THE WDA

Tachopteryx thorei

The literature list has been "reformatted" to make it easier to find the kind of literature you're looking for. As you'll see if you take a look at it, it's still mostly empty. But you can help me fill it: if you have a title and author of a book that should be stated, please mail me!

The version without frames has been removed, as I believe that only a very small minority of the visitors has a webbrowser (or a computer, for that matter) that isn't capable of using frames.

My e-mail address changed to: someaddresshere E-mail address changed again later so never mind!

11th of February, 1999
After having a server problem for several days, this site is available again.

A link has been added and another one was removed: The old website "Odoweb" has been transformed into the website of the NVL, the Dutch odonatologic society. Please update bookmarks and links! The old URL: http://stad.dsl.nl/~odonata now only contains a message that the page has moved to: http://fly.to/nvl

16th of October, 1998
It's been quite long since last update! But with this update, quite a lot of changes are made:

A completely framed version has been made. Of course, the frameless version will always be available and also be kept up-to-date!!! If you want frames, sellect that on the homepage

I made new scans of all pictures on the Picture Gallery to improve quality. Some inferior pictures were removed, replaced or reduced in size.

A whole lot of new pictures has been added: the Picture Gallery now contains over 140 pictures!!! New pictures include Anax parthenope (ENCI-groeve, the Netherlands), Calopteryx virgo meridionalis, Calopteryx xanthostoma, Orthetrum albistylum, Orthetrum brunneum (all Southern France) and Ophiogomphus cecilia (Germany). Even more pictures will be available soon!

"Various kinds of odonates" has been replaced by "Life of odonates": lots of information about the various kinds, their anatomy, lifecycle, their enemies and other important things. This issue is to be extended with much more information with upcoming updates! So check it out every now and then...

A new link to Martin Peterson's Homepage about the Swedish Dragonflies has been made, for he has moved. I spent quite a lot of time surfing the internet looking for more Odonates related websites. Quite a pile of sites was added to my link page. Surf's up, dudes!

23rd of March, 1998

This page is new.

Many pictures have been added to the picture gallery, including some beautiful pictures of Indian, Nepalese and Indonesian species. The Gallery now contains more than 95 pictures!!!

Links have been added and dead links have been removed.