Donald W. Stokes

This spring I began a native plant garden, and less than two months after getting everything in the ground, I’d acquired a monarch caterpillar on the milkweed. In a patch of weeds I removed everything that wasn’t a violet, the violets happily expanded to fill the space, and fritillary caterpillars appeared. I’ve gotten hooked on watching the caterpillars, and am contemplating how to expand the repertoire next year. This book is maybe not the “complete guide” it claims to be, but it show more covers the basics nicely, not for every butterfly in existence, but for the dozens that are typically around in the US. It has a section of life size butterfly photos for identification, a section of caterpillar photos, example plans of small and large butterfly gardens, a list of nectar plants and their bloom times, a list of caterpillar host plants, and a chapter on butterfly behavior. I mostly wanted it for the section on each butterfly family, which includes details about its behavior and preferences, a map of species range, and a table noting habitat, food, and time frame for life cycle stages. For the novice, a useful reference.

(read 25 Aug 2012) show less

An indispensable tool for helping me identify all of the avian visitors to my backyard as well as those who nest here.

Provides excellent photos, identifying descriptions, geographic ranges, feeding and nesting habits, as well as other interesting factoids.

Recommended for anyone wanting to learn about their everyday avian neighbors.

This is a selective guide to fifty genera of wildflowers chosen by the authors to represent a variety of lifestyles and habitats. For each wildflower there are five sections: Introduction, Wild and Garden Relatives, What You Can Observe, Flower-watching, and Through the Seasons. There is also a glossary at the end of the book.

For each wildflower, there is a lovely watercolor to introduce the flower, and then other drawings in the rest of its chapter. There are no color photos, however, which show more may impair one’s ability to distinguish clearly one wildflower from another. The book also seems geared to more temperate regions - I could not locate any desert wildflowers in this book. show less

I used to think this was an OK field guide for those who preferred photos to drawings, but that simply isn't the case.

The photos are highly imperfect and incomplete. Immatures, and other alternate plumages, are rarely pictured. For the most part, you're stuck with average photos of adults in breeding plumage. Additionally, there is no attention drawn to field marks in the photos, instead one must look to very cursory descriptions in the texts, which are rarely longer than one sentence for show more each plumage.

I will say that some of the photos are really nice and the book might be the easiest field guide to navigate. show less