Book for European insects? (1 Viewer)

[pdwinter]

Although this is now a dead thread - I would recommend Butterflies of Britain and Europe - A Photographic Guide by Haahtela, Saarinen, Ojalainen and Arnio as a butterfly guide that I find better for use in the field than Tolman and Lewington which was mentioned in post #17.

 

[Timbirder3]

Thanks Paul for reminding me of this. I knew there was a photographic guide that was highly recommended, but don't have it myself. In the field in Europe I use the Mitchell Beazley pocket guide. It's out of print and probably very dated but has the advantage of genuinely fitting in a pocket. The Tolman guide I leave in the hotel for later reference.
Tim

 

[Andy Adcock]

Although this is now a dead thread - I would recommend Butterflies of Britain and Europe - A Photographic Guide by Haahtela, Saarinen, Ojalainen and Arnio as a butterfly guide that I find better for use in the field than Tolman and Lewington which was mentioned in post #17.

Reprint (updated?) now available quite cheaply on Amazon..............

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Butterflies-Britain-Europe-Photographic-Guide/dp/147296053X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=9781472960535&qid=1614153004&sr=8-1

 

[pdwinter]

Reprint (updated?) now available quite cheaply on Amazon..............

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Butterflies-Britain-Europe-Photographic-Guide/dp/147296053X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=9781472960535&qid=1614153004&sr=8-1

Yes - that's the one. 2nd edition.

 

[opisska]

So on a second try, I finally received the Chinery book (the postal service can serious go f*** themselves for losing our packages). I have to say that I am quite surprised with the book - because it's pretty tiny. It's so small that it just doesn't make sense why not make it a bit larger and include more species. I understand that it's impossible to cover all the insects, but here I don't really understand the choice of brevity against a little bit more of coverage. In the meanwhile (as it took months to get the book) I became a bit interested in butterflies and dragonflies and I can already see the obvious missing species even in those popular and well marked families. The book is still absolutely fantastic for all the other families - it includes a lot of well explained morphological detail and it's really the thing I wanted - a lot of information to get a random critter to the right family. But it just could have been a little bigger.