The tiny hunter
During Walker’s lifetime, there were only a few other insect scientists and amateur collectors – whose records he eagerly assembled – in North America. Although dragonflies and damselflies, with their crystal wings and fairy habits, were no less charming back then, little information was available to make the insect group attract wider public interest.
During the last 20 years of his life, Walker set out to change that. His detailed identification keys and descriptions in The Odonata of Canada and Alaska (volume one was published in 1953 and the final volume was released after his death, in 1975) became, for many, the first window into the remarkable world of Canadian dragonflies.
“When I started looking at dragonflies in the eighties, I had one set of Walker’s books,” says Paul Pratt, a dragonfly expert and a naturalist with the City of Windsor’s Ojibway Nature Centre since 1975. “They were very expensive and out of print. You had to track them down in used book stores. But that’s really all there was.” Nowadays, says Pratt, easy-to-use illustrated field guides – including, most recently, a beautiful guide to the dragonflies and damselflies of Algonquin Park – are helping to make dragonfly watching one of the fastest-growing pastimes among Ontario naturalists.
“It’s as easy to learn dragonflies now as it is to learn butterflies,” says Pratt, who sees increasing numbers of dragonfly fans among members of the Essex County Field Naturalists’ Club, an Ontario Nature member group. “A lot of these dragonflies are easy to identify at a distance with binoculars. Watching them is also a good complement to bird watching, which tends to trail off at the end of May, when nesting season begins and dragonflies are just taking off.”
Specialized dragonfly websites, blogs and e-mail chat groups are becoming more common. The surge in interest has turned MNR’s Ontario Odonata Atlas – an effort that began in the mid 1990s to gather status information about dragonflies and damselflies in the province (see above) – into an ongoing compilation of records from amateur dragonfly watchers that is published annually in the journal Ontario Odonata.
Four decades after his death, Walker’s once almost solitary passion is catching on – ironically, just as the future of dragonfly and damselfly populations across the province are facing serious challenges. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, so what if [the rapids clubtail] goes? How is it going to affect me?’” says MNR’s Jones. “And the truth is that it may not. But if you take the rapids clubtail out of the equation, something is gone that may never come back. I think that’s tragedy enough.”
Walker would surely agree.
Peter Christie writes about science and nature from Kingston. His most recent book for young people is Animal Snoops: The Wondrous World of Wildlife Spies.
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