Review: Collins Butterfly Guide

I thought I’d give reviewing stuff and things another go. My initial thoughts on reviewing items was not to limit myself to brand new stuff that’s just come out, to be honest I can’t afford to buy new books when they come out, and secondly I thought it’d be nice to review older books to see if they stack up now, or they need updating, and just to be different!

Red Admiral. Photo: Author.

A couple of years ago I had a regular task of surveying butterflies at the Dove Stone reserve, I volunteered my time once a week from April to September to regularly walk a set route (or transect) and identify and count all the butterflies I see a set distance away (I talk about this in my 4th ever post in 2013!). This was absolutely brilliant and taught me a lot about both butterflies and survey techniques. So I’ve now got an interest in butterflies.

This week I acquired a copy of the Collins Butterfly Guide: The Most Complete Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and Europe by Tom Tolman and Richard Lewington and published in 2009 (currently priced £15.90 from Amazon UK). This is one of the ‘black’ Collins guides. I now own four of them, this one, the Fungi Guide, the Tree Guide, and the birders’ bible: Bird Guide. They all have one thing in common, they are comprehensive, they don’t shy away from the details. However they all seem to be different in approach.

The Collins Bird Guide and the Fungi guide are pretty accessible, the Bird Guide in particular. The Tree guide is less so, it is pretty confusing, especially when you are trying to find native trees amongst reams and reams of obscure ornamental non-natives which inhabit the book. But it is readable.

Which brings me to my subject, the Collins Butterfly Guide. I’ll give you this description of a common butterfly, the Green-veined White.

“First Brood: ups veins lined greyish; unh yellow, veins suffused greenish: male upf apical black scaling on veins variable, sometimes vestigial; spot in s3 variable, sometimes absent: female ups and uns black markings better developed, with additional spot in s1b and s5 upf.” and it continues..

I’m pretty familiar with some technical language by now but this is a step too far. There is a glossary of abbreviations towards the start of the book and another fuller glossary towards the back to help decipher the text but you need to memorise it pretty well to use the guide efficiently. There are very roughly 1000 species described in this manner, some more briefly than others. It seems to me that the authors have set out to make the guide as incomprehensible to the casual reader as possible. Even fairly basic and common terms have been omitted, for example the familiar butterfly stages that everyone knows including small children: Egg, Caterpillar, Chrysalis, and Adult/Butterfly have been replaced with Ovum, Larva, Pupa, and Imago, which whilst technically correct could prove another barrier to a casual reader.

On top of this overly technical and abbreviation obsessed text comes an assumed knowledge that the reader has an intimate knowledge of botanical scientific names. Let’s go back to the Green-veined White, the guide describes it’s host plants (the plants which the caterpillars feed on) as thus:

“Brassicaceae, including:- Cardamine pratensis; C. amara; C. palustris, Nasturtium officinale, Lepidium heterophyllum; Lunaria rediviva;“ and again it continues..

Of all those Scintific names I only recognise the family name Nasturtium. There is no English plant names mentioned, which is odd as the book is written in English. (Scientific names are universal no matter what language, a Parus major is universal but a Great Tit in English, a Koolmees in Dutch etc.). Maybe I’m displaying my own botanical ignorance but then again I’m trying to read a book marketed to a general readership; I’ve seen this book for sale in various Waterstones branches as well as in my local library.

Now to the good bits. The accompanying drawing of the butterflies are superb as you would expect from Richard Lewington, with all butterlies drawn with wings spread and wings folded up as they would at rest, maybe one minor criticism is there is no illustrations of caterpillars but I suppose space had to be saved somewhere! The depth is astonishing, as I said above there are very roughly 1000 butterflies described and illustrated from throughout Europe, you won’t get all this in any other generalist book.

Overall I wouldn’t recommend the Collins Butterfly Guide however. The language of the text is far too technical and is as a result pretty off putting; I would suggest that future editions tone the technical stuff down a bit! If you were looking for a butterfly guide to British and Irish moths I would recommend the Pocket Guide to Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland published by British Wildlife Publishing (£9 from Amazon UK), this again has great illustrations by it’s author Richard Lewington but it also has a very readable accompanying text. The various life-cycles such as egg caterpillar and chrysalis are also illustrated too. This book just focuses on butterflies found in the UK and Ireland so you don’t have to sift through 101 different European species of Grayling to get to your potential British butterfly. I could possibly suggest the Collins Guide to anyone touring Europe, it would just about fit nicely into a backpack for instance, it’s definitely not a coffee table book, just swat up on the abbreviations and the glossary beforehand! But if you are going to a specific country I’d probably try and source a country specific guide.

Thanks for reading this far!!

PS: Thanks to HIHO for adding me to their list of great-uk-bloggers on twitter! I’m humbled!

Common Micro-moths of Berkshire – a review

I’ve decided in 2015 to try and learn a different taxon group. I may even put birds on the back burner (in a non-professional sense) to concentrate on something else. A bit drastic I know but I don’t really want to be a one trick pony (who lets face it can’t always get the trick right!) and would love to broaden my naturalist horizon. Fungi appealed to me towards the end of last year and is a group I’ll take more interest in for sure. How about molluscs? More specifically slugs and snails, it’s niche and I’ve got two excellent books on them but they don’t really get me going if I’m honest. Now I’ve had a moth trap for coming up to five years which I’ve used most weeks in the summer months. Bingo! Moths it is, I’ve got the gear, I’ve some field guides, the local county recorder lives in my town, and the moths can come to you, not the other way around!

My local county recorder is Steve Hind (more specifically, the micro-moth recorder) and I paid him a visit before Christmas. He is a font of knowledge and provided great help, put me in contact with a local forum, and recommended me a load of books and journals. One of which was the ‘Common Micro-moths of Berkshire.’ This is slightly odd as I live in Cheshire, but I was assured only 6 of the moths in the book don’t occur in Cheshire at the moment. I had a quick flick through it and thought it looked great, so a month and £10 later I bought it.

Now micro-moths haven’t had a dedicated field-guide to them for one very good reason, there are literally thousands of them! And most of them don’t have an English name, instead most have scientific two part names. So they haven’t been all that accessible to the budding moth enthusiast (should they be called mothers perhaps? Maybe not.). This was rectified a couple of years ago with the publication of a dedicated field guide by Stirling and Parsons. But still the sheer number of them can be overwhelming; which is where ‘Common Micro-moths of Berkshire’ comes in.

I have to say the book is excellent, it covers 103 species of moth which are the most commonly recorded in Berkshire. There is an easy access thumbnail selection to quickly narrow down a potential moth at the start of the book and then a full page description of each moth, along with hinting at other moths your selection may be similar to. For example one of my favourite micro-moths is Emmelina monodactyla or ‘Common Plume,’ which I think looks like one of these:

Common Plume

Fiesler Storch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a brief description of the habitat of the Common Plume which is stated as a ‘variety of different habitats’ and whose status is ‘Common’ and then gives a detailed description of what it looks like highlighting important features to look out for, hopefully leading to an easy ID. If not than my potential Common Plume could, according to the similar species given, be a Stenopyilia bipunctidactyla or a S. pterodactyla. There is also a handy graph giving the flight seasons (when are you likely to see an adult flying moth?) although this is less helpful in more northern Cheshire than it would be if I lived in Berkshire. The guide does this pretty well for every moth, most of which are far less distinctive than the Common Plume. Because it is limited to common micro-moths which are you are more likely to catch in a light trap or whilst on a walk it doesn’t overwhelm you with hundreds of options to choose from. I definitely think you can use it in conjunction with the comprehensive Stirling and Parsons guide though, especially as not every description gives clues as to whether the moths are attracted to light or sugar, or are day-flying for instance.

The other thing to remark upon is that the production values of the book are superb. The book looks like it could have come from a major publishing house. It hasn’t. It comes from a local enthusiast group, the Berkshire Moth Group. It is incredibly professional looking, well laid out, glossy pages, a good index, and an appendix which goes into more detail with more alternative species similar to ones found in the main body of the book. There are a few errors which are highlighted in an Errata print-out loosely included at the beginning of the book, including a few mislabelled photographs which would unfortunately confuse IDs. But on the whole these shouldn’t distract from this fantastic book which I would recommend to any naturalist.

So I think I’ve got it. Moths it is for the year (OK maybe I can begin to look at slugs and snails too, and perhaps fungi, and maybe lichen. Perhaps also bryophytes, or perhaps beetles, or hoverflies, spiders even? Possibly.)

Book available from http://www.nhbs.com for £9.99.

Both photos from Wikicommons.