Eurasian Baskettail
(Epitheca bimaculata)

The Eurasian Baskettail (Epitheca bimaculata) is the only species of its genus in Europe. It's essentially an Eastern European species with some scattered populations further West, e.g. in France, Germany and Scandinavia. It's a large dragonfly with peculiarly long legs and a dark patch at the base of the hind wing which gives the species its scientific name. The adult animals are said to be tireless fliers which only rarely perch. During a recent field trip to Germany we managed to photograph only one emerging female. And although more exuviae (larval skins) had been found at our site the adult imagos proved too elusive to find, let alone photograph. More recently, though, we did manage to photograph a few emergences from start to finish in the North of France (see e.g. Dr1328 - Dr1322 below).

For an overview of the Eurasian Baskettail's distribution in Europe, hover your mouse pointer over the map symbol .
With the authors' permission we have based this map on data published in Kalkman et al. (2010).
Legend: Red = Occurs, White = Doesn't occur; Purple = Extinct; Yellow = Vagrant.

Hover your mouse pointer over a thumbnail below to display a larger version of it. Or click on a thumbnail to display the photograph (at 1050 x 700 pixels) in a new window. And then, if you'd like to get even closer, you can drag the ZoomBox from the top-left corner of that window across the photograph. Note that you may have to refresh the window manually (by pressing F5 on your keyboard) for the ZoomBox to display correctly.