Customer Reviews

A Field Guide to Insects: America North of Mexico

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Most amateur naturalists tend to expect page after page of photographs or drawings when they purchase a field guide. That is not what you will get in this book.

The authors, Borrer and White, have developed a sort of mini-entomology book for use in the field. The first part of the book contains helpful hints and instructions on how to collect and preserve insects. That section is followed by about 15 pages on the biology and taxonomy of this huge group. Understanding this information is essential if one is put together a useful insect collection. It also helps the insect watcher better understand what they are seeing in the ecology and body plans of these animals. Those sections are followed by over 300 pages of information that will help the determined insect watcher/collecter figure out the kind of animal they are looking at.

You should be advised that this book will NOT help you identify insects to the level of genus and species. The taxonomic information in this book targets primarily the family level (the level above the genus level).

Some reviewers have commented that the lack of color illustrations renders this book nearly useless. You need to understand that, for the serious collector, there are characteristics much more important in figuring out what they are looking at than color. The book is loaded with the kinds of information used by professional entomologists to identify the animals they study.

You should also be reminded that there are thousands of insect species, and many regional variations of those species, so no single field guide could ever hope to provide a comprehensive treatment of the group.

If you want/need a bounty of color photos to supplement your study, I recommend that you use this book along with a field guide like those available from the Audubon Society (E.g., The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders, which has over 700 photos of these animals).

The Peterson guide relies on illustrations rather than photos (illustrations are, I believe, far superior to photographs for identification work). There are both color and B/W illustrations in the book. There are also many helpful line drawings of body parts important to helping you ID insects.

I give this book 4 stars only because it tends to be a bit tougher for the casual amateur to use, but recommend it highly for the advanced amateur, as well as for general reference for the professional.

Well worth the price -- but not a child's book.

Good luck!

Alan Holyoak, Dept of Biology, Manchester College

At the risk of repeating myself to readers who are searching for an insect field guide, I said in another review:

Consider the lucky birders. In North America there are less than 900 species of birds. While some may be only 3 or four inches long, others are measured in feet. New birding guides are issued every year. And while a few species, like the empidonax flycatchers may be difficult to tell apart, all of the species are illustrated in most guides, and 90% are identifiable if the birder gets a good look at them.

Now consider the amateur entomologist. There are over 80,000 species of insects in North America. Most insects are relatively small. Telling the difference between species may require examining the vein pattern in wings. The field guides to insects illustrate at most 700 insects. No wonder there are more bird watchers than insect watchers. And no wonder there hasn't been a major insect field guide published since 1981!

A field guide to insects then probably can't help you identify most specific species. The authors feel they have done their job if they can help you identify the family.


The Peterson guide provided a decision tree just inside the front cover that helped me to identify the order of the insects. The tree also provided the page of the guide where the entries for this order could be found. Next I had to flip through the entries, which are arranged in taxological order, examining each of the black and white drawings to find an insect that most closely resembled my specimen. Occasionally a species listing bore a reference to a color drawing found on collected plates in the center of the book. Occasionally detailed drawing were provided for identification, such as a comparison of the wing venation of a family of bees. This information might have proved useful for identification if I had captured the insect. The drawings also had the arrows that Peterson has developed to highlight significant identification features.

I should note that some guides use photographs while others, like Peterson use drawings. My experience is that either method may be more advantageous in a specific case.

To find my butterfly-like insect I had to read carefully through the text on the order Leipidoptera to find that skippers could be differentiated by their clubbed antenna. No reference was made to their characteristic pose while perched. I was not able to identify my insect below the family level.

My bee seemed closest to a carpenter bee, although without an actual specimen I could not make a final identification.

I could not identify my fly as to family.

Although a lack of photographs may prove a disadvantage for identifying particular species, I found the black and white drawing usually useful for identifying insect families, although even more illustrations would have been useful for identification. Even though this was what I considered to be the best of the guides I reviewed, I still was not contented with it.

Those who prefer photographs to drawings may want to consider the "National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders". But be warned that like the Peterson Guide, that volume will also be less than satisfactory.

The guide aims to cover insects in America north of Mexico to family level. Few families are illustrated by more than a single figure of an adult and, while generally a single sex is shown, exceptions are made for some insects, for example in the color plates of damselflies. Where the sexes are very distinct (e.g. tussock moths or butterflies) it would have been helpful to show figures of both sexes. The book is predominantly one designed for identification and while it provides excellent coverage and a wonderful selection of figures, it rarely includes keys to help the novice zero on a particular family. The endpapers provide a quick and helpful guide to the principal insect orders, but once that level is reached, the reader must hunt out the descriptions of each suborder and/or superfamily to determine the appropriate group. The significant criteria that distinguish these suborders/superfamilies would be much easier to learn and compare were their descriptions put together on the same page rather than scattered through the section waiting to be discovered by searching the text or looking up the appropriate page by using the index. There is good chapter on collection methods and a brief introduction to insect structure and growth. Deficiences include the following - The book was originally published in 1970: however, the publisher has not taken the opportunity to update the original bibliography in any of the reprints. Nor have resources like Entomological organizations been listed. While the worldwide web makes it easier to access this new information, it would have been helpful to see the experts' recommendations.

The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars was because of the lack of color photos or plates. I honestly read half the book when I first recieved it. I got it because I was worried that this creature I had found was a mutant or something (turned out it was a velvet ant). It does have quite a bit of information on the different animals that make up the order of insects. It does not though give detail into any peticualar family though. There are after all WAY to many insects out there to fit into just one book. Check out the other field guides for butterflies, moths, or whatever you are into. It can be a little technical for the layman (i.e. me) but will help get you started on your adventures in collecting and learning about insects.

"In this century," according to ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich, "no one has done more to promote an interest in living creatures than Roger Tory Peterson, the inventor of the modern field guide." Peterson's "Guide to the Birds" - "the first modern field guide" - was published in 1934. Its pioneering approach was to use visual characteristics rather than technical data to identify species. This was achieved by grouping similar species together on a plate, using clear, two-dimensional illustrations, and pointers to key field marks as well as succinct text, a combination known as the Peterson Identification System. That revolutionary style was later applied to a host of field guides covering anything from the night sky to moths and geology to mushrooms and including the present volume.

Here we have Number 19 in the Peterson Field Guide Series, published in 1970 and still in the original edition. Borror, an entomologist and well-known sound-recordist, is the author and contributed line-drawings. The main illustrations, in colour and monochrome, are by Richard White.

With over 90,000 species of insects in America north of Mexico, a field guide to the insects must choose between being highly selective or else providing an overview to enable the user to identify major taxonomic groups. This guide achieves the latter aim admirably, allowing the reader to identify most insects to family level for 579 families. Apart from the systematic text, there are introductory chapters on collecting insects, studying live insects and basic insect biology as well as a handy Glossary.

Because of the mammoth diversity of insects, a single volume work cannot be expected to allow the reader to identify insects to species by using colour plates. Indeed, many insects are simply not identifiable without a specimen. So, by the very nature of the subject matter, this may not be a book to be used by the unprepared casual observer. However, serious amateur naturalists have for decades enjoyed it as an invaluable aid to insect identification. Indispensable!

Most who use this book have the same general complaint -- no color. Color, however, can be one of the most useless characteristics in identifying insects (especially if there are multiple color morphs).

Since this is not a guide which was designed to identify every insect species within a given range (which is impossible within the scope of a single tome), it does its job well...and that job is to help narrow the possibilities of identifications for each individual insect. There are specialist books for more specific (excuse the pun) identifications. This book may be used to point toward the specialist books necessary for correct identifications and should be used in that fashion.

There is a lot to be learned from Richard E. White's book, and reading the book from cover to cover is recommended for every insectophile. That's why, in spite of the inability to correctly identify even every insect in my backyard, I give this book 5/5.

There are few books that can carry the responsibility of identifying insects easily. This is one of them. More illustrations would be helpful as would more information, but the limits of a field guide size limit this. It's a sufficiently detailed book that field researchers can use it but not so scientific (read opaque) that naturalists can't use it. It would be a useful book for anyone who's identifying insects and has little formal training in entomology. It'd be nice if the authors covered arachnids, too.

I have used this book for years. It is great for quick and easy insect identification. Good for the entomologist as well as the layman. Few color illustrations (lots of B & W) but since insects are very rarely identified by color, this is practically irrelevant. Highly recommended.

This is a good book, however, there are 3 entries that provide incorrect sexes. In particular, the fall cankerworm. This insect is identified in the picture as a female moth, when in truth, it is the male. Females are wingless, this is why banding trees is helpful in control, since she must climb the tree to lay her eggs. The other two entries are also moths, something the author should have been aware of. The book would also benefit from better pictures, rather than illustrations. But for the most part it is a helpful guide and would recommend it next to the audoban societies guide to north american insects.

This book is the most comprehensive general field guide to insects available. It has both good pictures and text that can help the amateur identify insects down to the family and occasionally down to genus and species.