martytdx's Full Review: Jeffrey Glassberg - Butterflies Through Binoculars...
Last summer, my wife and I both had Nikon D70 dSLR cameras to play with, and unfortunately were dealing with one of the hazards of summers in the mid-Atlantic region - a dearth of interesting birds to photograph. You can only take so many pictures of robins, catbirds and sparrows. So, eager to play and explore, we started turning our attentions to other subjects. One of those was something I had made fun of my naturalist buddy for getting excited about - butterflies. But once we started looking at them - and dragonflies - and getting some nice shots, we suddenly found ourselves scrambling to ID the species. Like many things, until you really start watching, you never realize how much variance there can be. The web was a great help (particularly www.bugguide.net), but we wanted something with more meat to it that made it easier to find these specimens, or at least put us in the right direction.
So, we went out to get some guidebooks. There are a lot of them out there, and I'd used and enjoyed the Audubon Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, so Butterflies of North America was my first choice. But we were disappointed with the guide, since it seemed disorganized, the pictures were not always very representative and were hard to ID from. Many other books were simply very simple and incomplete - great for the backyard who just wants to name the most common varieties, but not for what we were going for. So, humbled, we went to that same mocked naturalist for his suggestion - the "...Through Binoculars" series of books. He said that the pictures were great, it was well-organized and it was the best of the bunch. Seeing as he worked as a naturalist, I trusted his judgement, which proved sound as always.
[ • about the GUIDE •]
This guide is well organized - something I would have assumed if it hadn't been for some other examples that we'd come across - and makes it easy to find and research what you're looking for. Written and edited by Jeffrey Glassberg, President of the North American Butterfly Association and , the book starts out with a great primer on the basics of butterflies and their anatomy, habits and identification. The diagram(s) points out parts that often used to ID similar butterflies, and is a great tool that I've returned to on several occasions.
Then come the main sections of the book: the textual and photographic species accounts. The text section breaks down the butterflies by families, genuses and species, giving a ton of information about each butterfly, some comparative notes and useful tidbits about the genuses and families themselves. The photographs, presented in a series of plates, give the user a great set of images to use for comparing to the species you're looking at (or have photographed, as the case is with us).
Text Accounts »
Each section begins with a family of butterflies - Brushfoots, skippers, etc., and then delves into sub-families, genuses, sub-genuses and finally individual species accounts. Glassberg uses his extensive experience to not only give the facts about distribution, identification and basic behavior, but often imparts some extra bits of not-so-common knowledge that can prove invaluable in helping ID or find a butterfly. As for the 'official' stuff, each species account lists the following information:
Common Name, species name, plate number
Size
Similar Species
Identification
Habitat
Abundance
Major Foodplant
Comments
Lifecycle
Similar Species and Identification are both key elements of this section, allowing you to find specific aspects to look for and help you differentiate between two or more species that might confuse you. This is where Glassberg excels: he puts the key markers in plain language (as much as things such as "HW below, note the white veining and areas of dark brown" are plain language), and offers up some truly good ways to separating two similar species. Habitat and Major Foodplant both give great ideas of where to look for the species you are trying to track down - and also help you narrow your search based on where you saw a species.
Abundance is a misnomer - it really speaks to when they will be around and breeding, and how many broods they will have. Comments are usually more information about the species, such as when it was deemed its own species or general observations about this particular species - and this information is usually pretty interesting if not very helpful. The Lifecycle chart at the end of each species record is a great resource, because it shows the times when each species is around and how abundant it is in each of four regions (in this case, Wisconsin, New York, North Carolina and Louisiana). The thicker the line, the more abundant it is in that month.
The one piece of information that I find maddening is the Size. On most records, all of the sizes are in relative terms - meaning that you see things like <Painted Lady or << Eastern Tailed-Blue instead of actual sizes. The reference species have the size in terms of inches, but I would much prefer every record to be something like 10/16 in. (> Eastern Tailed-Blue) so that I can think in real and relative terms.
Plates »
One of the best ways to ID a butterfly - and I'm sure the primary way for 99.9% of the population - is through visual means, i.e. a picture. It's nice to know to look for a black spot on the hindwing, but seeing a true photograph of the animal in living color is by far a better method. And in this case, almost all of the images are superb. Organized in a method that follows the taxonomy of the text portion, it groups together species and genuses, and then groups the butterflies that most closely represent each other onto the same plate, making it easier to common species that are physiologically similar and/or easily confused. In most cases, there are 8 pictures to a plate (on the right-hand side), with the range maps and some helpful text on the left-hand page. In most cases, they will show the [ventral] (side) and [dorsal] (back) views of the butterfly with different images for males and females (when they are sexually dimorphic). This is great because all too often you don't get a view of the wings open AND closed, and have to try to ID from one or the other. Sometimes, there are individual pointers in the images to highlight a particular field mark, but these are relatively rare.
Occassionally, on species like skippers, they will show more pictures, as space will allow. They will also show alternate looks (called morphs) for the species, and reference how these alternate morphs can mimic other closely-related species. This can be great because no butterfly is going to look just like it does in a reference photograph, and those differences can make them look maddeningly like another species.
For the most part, the images are fantastic. The amount of time it must have taken to track down a lot of these images is mind-boggling. However, there are some that leave something to be desired - but you have to realize that many of these species are incredibly skittish, and getting a shot of them in next to impossible. If you can't get close enough to see them, imagine trying to do so with a camera! Still, there are some that make it very hard to ID from but only time (and contributed photographs) can help that.
At the end of the book, the index acts as an index AND a checklist (with checkboxes next to the common names). Not nearly as convenient as a real checklist but still a nice touch. Lastly, the book covers contain silhouettes of several common species - again, not a huge bonus but a nice extra.
[ • is this BOOK FOR YOU? • ]
If you are an avid hobbyist of butterflies and living in the eastern half of the U.S. and southern Canada, then you will probably find this book helpful. If you are more casual, you might find it a bit more than you need to ID the majority of backyard butterflies. Published in 1999, but stands up well to test of time - of course, I don't know how much butterflies change in 7 years. Author Jeffrey Glassberg knows his stuff and offers up real suggestions that don't sound professor-like as you read them. The pictures are great and offer real opportunities to get an ID from, and are better organized than any other guide I've used. My wife and I have found it completely invaluable at this point, although it doesn't cover moths or errant western butterflies (although we don't really run into the latter very often). Still, I often find myself thumbing through it to ID something I saw, or to see where I should go next in a quest for that next butterfly to photograph. If you're into butterflies, be sure to check this one out before buying any of them.
[ • related REVIEWS • ] Dragonflies through Binoculars - coming soon
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