Customer Reviews

A Field Guide to Eastern Butterflies

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I got this from my son who needed a field guide to take to the park and forests. He loves it and so do I. Before we had borrowed our local libraries' 1950 edition of butterfly field guild. What an improvement! Unlike some people we just love it. The pictures are easy to use in the open where you can just notice a few things before whats being observed takes off flying. Opler is very good at listing the most obvious ID factors for each species. And it fits great in a back pack!

Teensy-weentsy photographs (of which there are few) and tiny drawings do not an identification tool make. Often, the verbal descriptions given for a butterfly do not match, nay, directly contradict the photograph or drawing included! The practice of providing a textual description on one page, a range map (if there even is one) on another, and yet a third page for the descriptive drawing make this a page-turning nightmare.

In short, take this book from your public library - don't waste your money on a very poorly done work.

As an amateur watcher just wanting to know which butterflies were in my garden, I was somewhat disappointed. I spent a great deal of time trying to compare the butterfly with the poorly represented plates. The few pictures scattered through the book were better, but I found errors in the identification given for the picture and the identification given in the plate and one was even not listed on the page they gave (or no where I have yet to find). The range listed were difficult for me to know if this species was in my backyard and not every species had a range map. These errors I found in one whole afternoon while trying to identify only THREE butterflies in my garden. Some of the book I like, like some of the intro information, but I guess other books have this info also. I was frustrated.

The maps in this book are a useful feature, but they are not provided for many of the species. The colour plates are very disappointing, as they often show only one gender of the butterflies and also ignore various subspecies and geographical variations. As the plates are made up drawings, it is often hard to identify species using this field guide, and the reader is left guessing as only the most common variation is shown. The text is quite well done, but moreadditions and details can be made. This book is hardly good as a main field guide (I greatly recommend "The butterflies of North America: a natural history and field Guide" by James A. Scott -- by far the best single-volume guide to American Butterflies), but it is useful as a pocket book that is light and does not take up much space.