The air miles of a dragonfly

IN HER book Wild Dublin, Éanna Ní Lamhna mentions an unusual visitor to one of the city’s parks.

On October 12 1913, a man named Douglas saw an odd-looking insect on the grass in Herbert Park. He promptly took a swipe at it and sent the specimen to the Natural History Museum in Kildare Street, where it remains to this day. The insect turned out to be a dragonfly but no ordinary one. The Irish dragonfly and damselfly list runs to more than 30 species but this one was not among them. It was identified as a ‘vagrant emperor’, a native of India and sub-Saharan Africa.

Dragonflies, particularly the hawkers, are powerful fliers, able to stay in the air for long periods, but flights of thousands of miles must surely be impossible for them. So how did this little creature manage to get here? Recent research by a naturalist living in the Maldives, may provide part of the answer.