“You are cordially invited to Nature Sussex’s April 2023 meeting. The meeting will be held on Monday evening, April 24th at St. Mark’s Anglican Church, 4 Needle St in Sussex Corner. Masks are not required but encouraged.

 The meeting begins at 7 pm and the presentation will begin at 7:30 pm.

Did you know that?:

• New Brunswick has over 140 species of dragonflies and damselflies, which is more than is found in all of Europe.
• A species of dragonfly that occurs in New Brunswick and is widespread globally actually has the longest migration of any insect, even further than the Monarch butterfly.
• The order Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) is one of the oldest groups of insects found on the planet. They have been around for more than 300 million years!

Come learn more about this fascinating and very important group of insects that are dragonflies in a rich presentation using imagery, notes, quotes, and anecdotes. This engaging, visually stunning, and thought-provoking presentation will be given by our own Denis Doucet.

Since the mid-1980s, Denis has been a naturalist and avid nature photographer, observing, studying, and photographing dragonflies and many other living things. He currently resides in Sussex Corner and works at Fundy National Park as a Heritage Interpreter, a job he loves and has done with Parks Canada for nearly a quarter-century. He has taught Ornithology at l’Université de Moncton (1999-2003) and is a former assistant zoologist, then zoologist with the Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Centre (ACCDC, 2003-2009). He has also worked as a naturalist with The Irving Eco-centre la Dune de Bouctouche from 1996-2001 and as a long-time hiking and nature guide with Fundy Hiking and Nature Tours (1995-2008). His images of birds and insects have been published in more than a dozen nature guides and books, including Dragonflies and Damselflies of the East by Dennis Paulson (Princeton Field Guides, 2011), A Field Guide to Flower Flies of Northeastern North America by Jeffery Skevington and Michelle Locke (2019), the Flower Flies of Minnesota by Scott King (2021), the Second Atlas of Breeding Birds of the Maritime Provinces (many authors, 2015), The Beetles of North America by Arthur V. Evans (2014), Pacific Northwest Insects by Merrell Peterson (2018) and the forthcoming (2023) Butterflies of Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces by Philip deMaynadier, John Klymko, Ronald G. Butler, W. Herbert Wilson Jr., and John V. Calhoun, among others.