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About the author
Steve Brooks has been interested in dragonflies since he was young. He was impressed by the voracious dragonfly larvae that ate everything else in the jars he had filled during pond-dipping trips, and by the adult dragonflies later emerging from those same jars lined up on his bedroom windowsill. Steve has been fortunate to pursue this interest in his professional career as a specialist in freshwater insects and environmental change at the Natural History Museum in London, where he is now a Scientific Associate following retirement in 2017. He has published 275 scientific papers and book chapters, many of them on dragonflies, and five books, including the New Naturalist volume Dragonflies with Philip Corbet. Steve is a founder member of the British Dragonfly Society (BDS), a former editor of the Journal of the British Dragonfly Society, and currently serves on the BDS Conservation Committee. He is Associate Editor of Odonatologica.Steve Cham has had a life-long interest in all aspects of natural history and a passion for dragonflies from an early age. He has served as Vice-county recorder for Bedfordshire and was National Co-ordinator for the Dragonfly Recording Network after it transitioned from the Biological Records Centre at Monkswood, and was one of the editors of the Atlas of Dragonflies in Britain and Ireland published in 2014. He is the author of a number of books on dragonflies, including popular field guides to larvae and exuviae. Steve was elected to honorary membership of the NBN Trust in 2008 in recognition of his services to biological recording in the UK and awarded the Royal Entomological Society Marsh Award for Insect Conservation in 2011.Richard Lewington is an acknowledged leader in the field of insect illustration. His meticulous paintings of wildlife are the mainstay of many of the modern classics of field-guide art, including The Butterflies of Britain and Ireland, Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland, Guide to Garden Wildlife and Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland. Richard has also designed and illustrated wildlife stamps for several countries. In 1999 he was awarded Butterfly Conservation's Marsh Award for the promotion of Lepidoptera conservation, and in 2010 the Zoological Society of London's Stamford Raffles Award for contribution to zoology. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.
