Ruary Mackenzie Dodds tells the story of a surprising insect, the Bush Giant Dragonfly.

Of the close to 6,500 worldwide species of Odonata, only 10 spend their larval life in burrows. The rest live in open water. Since 2018, Ruary and his partner Kari de Koenigswarter have been studying the nocturnal behaviour of one of these burrow-dwellers, New Zealand’s Bush Giant, Uropetala carovei. Bush Giants live in ‘colonies’, i.e. clustered groups of self-excavated burrows, located in seepages usually found beside small steeply-sloping watercourses.

Our work has involved the setting up of continuously-running night vision cameras at a site high in the bush above a Wellington suburb, about 22 miles from our base. We’ve learned that Bush Giants don’t go hunting, they lurk at the tops of their burrows catching prey with their labial masks, which they also use as shovels. They come and go exactly with the dusk and the dawn. They are super-sensitive about possible predators. When it’s time for them to transform into adults, they take eight hours to do so. This and many more stories about these fascinating dragonflies!

Ruary Mackenzie Dodds is obsessed with dragonflies. Together with his partner Kari de Koenigswarter and a group of volunteers he set up three major dragonfly awareness-raising iniatives in the UK.

Ruary and Kari now spend most of their time in New Zealand. They have given dragonfly talks/demonstrations to many Kiwi audiences, including the Zealandia Eco-Sanctuary, where they run upskilling courses for volunteers and staff. Ruary also carries out dragonfly survey and consultancy work for the Greater Wellington Regional Council.