Looking for a lep reference book recommendation

[Sheryll]

Hi,

The new place is full of beautiful bugs, too. I had been trying to not get into butterflies and dragonflies but I give up. It is impossible to ignore the pretty ones in front of your eyes. I guess I should even learn about the wasp family members, we have at least six distinct species.

Can anyone recommend a bug book akin to Sibley's or NG's bird guides?

TIA,
Sheryll

[betsy]

For odonata you might want to try this:

Abbott, J.C. (2005) Dragonflies and Damselflies of Texas and the South-Central United States: Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

For butterflies/moths, as I recall, Ken Nanney recommended some good books last summer in the Chat forum -- search for that.

For a more general reference, there's this:

Eaton, E.R. (2007) Kaufmann Field Guide to Insects of North America: The Easiest Guides for Fast Identification. NY:Houghton-Mifflin.

Eric Eaton, btw, used to answer queries on the bugnet listserve, tho I think he got overloaded when he was doing the book and had to delist himself. He and other bug afficionados have created a nifty bug website, though, where queries on photos of bugs are answered by various members:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/15740

You'll notice that on their ID pages they cite the references they consulted, so you can look there for suggestions, too.

There are a number of other good identification websites as well, and checklists of various insect types that are found in Texas will help to keep you from going astray.

http://www.insectidentification.org/

http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/

http://butterflywebsite.com/articles/npwc/butterflychecklist.cfm

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/research/projects/butmoth/

http://www.dallasbutterflies.com/

http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Environment/NHR/lepidoptera.html

http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/distr/insects/dfly/index.htm

http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/distr/insects/dfly/chklist/states/counties/tx_113.htm

http://www.iodonata.net/

http://www.texasento.net/index.html

This website can be really handy for some things (like ladybugs), but usually requires one to know the family and/or genus name of something:

http://www.discoverlife.org/mp/20q

YW,
Betsy

[Susan]

Here's one I consider to be a very user-friendly fieldguide for butterflies:

Butterflies of North America by Brock and Kaufman. Layout is very similiar to the good birding field guides, and the "pictorial table of contents", four pages in the front, gets you quickly right to the correct family when using it in the field.

For Dragonflies, there's a good guide "Dragonflies through Binoculars" by S. Dunkle, Oxford Press, 2000. (there is also a Butterfly one in the same series, author Jerry Glassberg).

By the way, on the DCLS website, www.dallasbutterflies.com (http://www.dallasbutterflies.com), scan down on the homepage left sidebar all the way to "What's on the Wing", to see what's being reported weekly in the area by Dale Clark and local butterfliers. Click on the species' names for info and photos. Susan