Dear Norman, No doubt, if they could, dragonflies would enthusiastically celebrate today’s 80h birthday of the man who spent more than six decades of his life studying their habits and, above all, promoting the protection of their habitats, in a life devoted to conservation. They are perhaps not aware of the way many of their homes would look, and of the grave destiny many of their kin would have suffered – if it were not for your conservation initiatives throughout the world. Therefore, on behalf of dragonflies and on our own behalf, the world community of dragonfly students presents you with this issue of Odonatologica, as a token of thanks for everything you have done, and are still doing, for the protection and conservation of their world. Your attention to morphological detail, as apparent from your early publications (1939, 1942), would seem to indicate a young potential taxonomist. But your life and interests took a different turn – and your research on odonate territoriality (1952a) was one of the highlights both of your studies and of the science of odonatology ofthat time. This is an absolutely classical publication, and a firm basis for most work in dragonfly ethology and population biology ever since. Various aspects of population biology have had your continuous attention. For the duration and precision of systematic recording, your studies in Woodwalton Fen (1991a, 2001a) will certainly remain unmatched in odonatological literature for a long time to come; the two publications represent an important reference for studies of community succession in the Northern Hemisphere.