Customer Reviews

Peterson Field Guide(R) to Eastern Moths (Peterson Field Guide Series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I had to look for awhile and put an Amazon search out to find this one used and I'm SO glad I did. This book was recommended to me by a locat naturalist who has been photographing and cataloging moths for many years. His copy is well worn with wonderful notes in the margins (oh if only I could have found such an edition!) I finally found this one and must say I'm starting to make my own annotations in the margins. Moths are pretty tricky to id - there are just so many different species. This book has been wonderful for me though - there are many color plates and the images are pretty clear. Arrows are drawn to specific areas where you should look to help distinguish between this and that species. The text is great too - helps in narrowing down which species it is if you know it either definitely does/does not occur in your area. Food sources are provided too which helps to solve the mystery. Similar species are indicated so you can see what you might be confusing the species with. Fantastic book - so glad I found it!!

Dr. Covell has done a marvelous job with this field guide. His wonderful descriptions and pictures of moths make it easy for the average Joe to identify moths.

This is a guide that comes well recommended, but has been out of print for a long time. Finding it wasn't very easy. That said, if you have an interests in moths, you really need a guide and this might be the best of what's available. There are about 960 birds in North America. There are over 10,500 moths in the same geographic space. And they are sometimes distractingly difficult to differentiate. So, there IS a definite need for a comprehensive field guide...which this is.

A modern guide with large, color illustrations would be a blessing but this is what is available. There is no doubt that there is a great deal of excellent data here, but visually, it's the old format and really could use revamping. (Anyone listening?) The illustrations are clustered in the center of the guide with descriptions and related text in both the front and the rear of the guide. It's cumbersome and slower to make comparisons or identifications this way. Just about all of the images are of pinned specimens. This is NOT how one would see them in the field. It DOES give you a good view of both for and hind wings, but we rarely ever see them like this. The color illustrations are pretty good but a bit small. The B & W illustrations (the majority) are really tough for all but the largest or most obvious field marks. I don't find these useful most of the time.

It would be a huge undertaking to modernize and reissue this field guide with larger, clear color illustrations, and perhaps even range maps, but it would be a great thing to do, and, I'm sure, would be readily accepted by those who have an interest in moths.

All in all, it's a useful guide with a great deal of excellent data, but it's just waiting for some extremely ambitious person to bring it up to date. Perhaps this should be done as a 2 volume set...Eastern and Western. In that way, so much data would more easily fit into guides that are easily pocketed and taken into the field.

I am a novice learning about observing birds, butterflies, and moths. I have a number of useful books on birds and butterflies to compare against. Moths are quite a challenge to identify with so much variety.

In this book, the images are a little small, and the spread wing photos of dead moths are a little challenging for me to compare to my live shots with the wings tucked in. Maybe as I mature in this area I will be able to use the descriptions and photos more effectively. Not many other moth books out there, so I would recommend the book to other novices, but don't expect as much as the more common birding and butterfly books.