Dragonflies of North America, written & illustrated by Ed Lam (Princeton University Press, 2024) ISBN: 9780691232874 £25

Reviewed by Dr Chris Gibson

Another month, another in the series of definitive field guides from the stable of Princeton University Press. For us on this side of the Atlantic, the species may be mostly unfamiliar, but the format of the book isn’t – it has almost the same dimensions as the Field Guide to the Dragonflies of Britain and Europe by Dijkstra & Schröter, illustrated by Richard Lewington (2020).

But whereas our guide covers both dragonflies and damselflies (165 species), the American guide covers just dragonflies (329 species), omitting the 170 or so damselflies. This of course is testament to the vast scale of North America – to have included the damsels at least in the same format, would have rendered an already-heavy guide very unwieldy indeed.

Comparison between the guides inevitably focuses upon the illustrations. Although I am unfamiliar with most New World species, there is an overlap of half-a-dozen species, and these show both guides to be equally impressive in the quality of the illustrations. Indeed, the American one in some ways is superior, with the very consistent page layout of both males and females from above and the side to make comparisons easy, one page per species except for the rarest or the most variable.

Another difference is that Ed Lam’s illustrations are reproduced at almost the same size, so that one has to refer to the text to discover the actual size, an important attribute when beginning the process of identification. Lewington’s are scaled at 1.4x life-size (for dragonflies), so the relative sizes are apparent from the images, which I prefer, especially when they are (as they so often are) flying swiftly by!

The text is much more limited than in the European guide, which is not a bad thing. It covers size, habitat and key identification features (the latter also reflected in annotations) while maps show distribution. At the foot of each page, ‘similar species’ and key differentiators are covered briefly; these similar species could usefully have page number cross-references. However, many of the species are so similar that it would also be good to have had some structure to the identification process: keys (however simple) and perhaps subdivisions based on range, would help the beginner and improver.

One perennial bugbear for me (it’s an American thing!) is that measurements are given in both centimetres and inches; bizarrely the inches are subdivided decimally rather than into the more widely recognized eighths. And sadly, on the first spread (pp. 252–3) that Jude looked at with her sharp proofing eyes the lengths are incorrect: 43 mm cannot be both 1.3 and 1.7 in. Of course a book like this is never completely free of errors, but one being on the first page is a bit worrying.

At a little over a kilogram, this guide is almost twice the weight of the European near-equivalent, and really not a ‘field guide’ in the easily portable sense. In part this is down to the in my view excessively heavy paper. A paper stock like in the European guide seems perfectly adequate, and could have reduced the overall weight by maybe 20%.

Nevertheless anyone with an interest in North American insects needs a copy of this on their shelves: I used it to successfully identify photos I took 15 years ago in New Jersey. And of course, many Odonata are wanderers so it is not impossible that with climate chaos we may see more American species on our shores. Be prepared!

First published in the British Naturalist Issue 22 March 2025, p 37-38, published by British Naturalists’ Association.