Dragon's day

They called her "Madame Dragonfly" (if not, perhaps, to her face). When she died, in 1991, The Irish Times obituary remembered how "with her tidy, good clothes and plucked eyebrows, she looked as if she was about to open a rather smart village fete, but her real self would be revealed by such remarks as: `I find machetes so useful in the jungle, don't you?"'

Cynthia Longfield was one of those Big House daughters who give the Anglo-Irish a good name. Born with an analytical brain and no money worries, she found her life's passion in a corner of natural science that few seemed very keen on: the whirring, glittering family of Odonata. After a lively Edwardian childhood among the moths and frogs of Castle Mary, Cloyne, Co Cork, a family home since the late 1600s, she took off on intrepid entomological adventures in steamier reaches of the world (the Matto Grosso, for example) and became - almost by default, but certainly on merit - the British Museum's authority on dragonflies.

It does seem strange that, while butterflies and moths have won so much zeal from naturalists, the "devil's darning needles" have been so overlooked. They're just as varied and beautiful, even spectacular, and critical species can only be told apart by details of their genitalia: a special challenge.

Cynthia Longfield's handbooks of the species of Britain and Ireland were the first to do them justice, and in her decades of retirement at Castle Mary (she lived to 96), she set off in her Austin car on field-trips with butterfly net, binoculars and walking stick to top up the study of Irish dragonflies she had begun in the 1920s. When, in the 1970s, distribution atlases of Irish wildlife began to be prepared for the Irish Biological Records Centre (since absorbed into Duchas), the map of dragonflies leaned heavily on her records. She wrote to a Mayo inquirer when she was 81: "I can no longer take on any useful work on identification, and at present there is no expert in Ireland. The professional entomologists from the museums or colleges or institutes are all fumbling in the dark, as far as the dragonflies are concerned." In the years that followed, a small corps of Odonata enthusiasts, some from Britain, took up her butterfly net, as it were, to fill in some of the blanks.

But now the insects' turn has come around. In a four-year project, Dragonfly Ireland, backed by Duchas, the Heritage Service, the north's Environment and Heritage Service and the Ulster Museum, Ireland's amateur dragonfly recorders, naturalists and wildlife wardens will document the status and distribution of the insects throughout the island.

The north is contributing the dragon's share of the drive behind the project. Its organiser, Robert Thompson, lives in Co Down. Its chief dragonfly expert, Dr Brian Nelson, is at the Ulster Museum in Belfast. There, too, is CEDAR, the Centre for Environmental Data and Recording, holding almost a million records of northern wildlife species and sites in its databases. This is also the anchor for the project's excellent website, layered with facts and gorgeous photographs (www.dragonflyireland.fsnet.co.uk).

Nature, fortunately, knows no borders, and the co-operative nature of Dragonfly Ireland is well symbolised in the exquisite insect featured on the project's poster, a delicately slender damselfly with a body banded in black and azure-blue.

This is the rather special Irish damselfly, Coenagrion lunulatum, not found in Britain and discovered in Sligo only in 1981. It's rare outside of northern Finland and the Irish population is one of the largest in western Europe. Living in small colonies, scattered chiefly through the smaller drumlin lakes of the Border counties, it will be on the wing from now until the end of July. The hope is that further colonies will be mapped through the Midlands, where dragonfly recorders have been scarce.

The resident total of Odonata for Ireland is 22 species, shared equally between damselflies (Zygoptera) and the more robust dragonflies (Anisoptera). This is the usual 60 per cent of what Britain has. It means that any piece of water with more than 10 breeding species is important for protection; the most ever recorded from a single Irish site was 15.

But our meagre ration may be augmented, not only by several wanderers from Europe (especially as our climate warms) but dragonflies arriving regularly on the westerly winds of late autumn, along with American waders and warblers: the North American Green Darner is one possibility.

Cynthia Longfield was one of the first dragonfly experts to begin coining common names for the insects, in the hope of making them as popular for study as butterflies or birds. Four-spotted Libellula, for example, is marginally easier to remember than Libellula quadrimaculata, though the Latin does have a certain flourish. This, incidentally, is one of our most widespread darter dragonflies - that is, it flies up from a perch to dash after prey and then returns to it - and will be on the wing from now until late in August.

Hawker dragonflies have a different behaviour, whirring up and down a chosen beat, perhaps a stream or canal, catching midges or mosquitoes in the hairy scoop of their front legs and often munching them on the wing. If the prey is very large, they may land to eat it: I once met the lovely male Common Aeshna, enormous and kingfisher blue, finishing off a wasp in the blackcurrant bushes. A hawker on the wing just now is the Hairy Dragonfly, zooming fast and low along streams or canals.

Dragonflies and damselflies aren't always easy: too many species look dazzlingly alike, and sexes often differ in their colours and patterns. Dragonfly Ireland intends to offer participants field trips for familiarisation. For this, and constant updates on what's flying, check the website.

The Dragonfly Ireland website is at www.dragonflyireland.fsnet.co.uk. Robert Thompson is at 8 Weaver's Court, Banbridge, Co Down BT32 4RP; e-mail: rstl@bann8.fsnet.co.uk Read more about Cynthia Longfield in Stars, Shell and Bluebells: Women Scientists and Pioneers, published in 1997 by Women in Technology and Science, PO Box 3783, Dublin 4.