It was cold and overcast today but I still found a great damselfly - on my computer! In 2008 I lead a tour to Turkey together with Paul Hope, expressly targeting the dragonflies of Eastern Muğla Province. We found 40 species in a week, finding several new sites for Ceriagrion georgifreyi and I found Paul a new species for the province - Leucorrhinia pectoralis. Despite all this going on, the Platycnemis dealbata pictured above slipped through the net somehow. I think this may be the only record of this species west of the Taurus Mountains. At the time I had never seen this species, but four years later just two seconds was enough to correctly identify it! I wonder what else is lurking in my photographs...
A sobering reminder that what makes observers good at finding rarities and vagrants is constantly staying alert to the possibility of actually finding one!
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