new book: Butterflies of Ontario & Eastern Canada by John Acorn and Ian Sheldon

[Alan Macnaughton]

This book, just out on April 15 from Partners Publishing, will please some people but not others. A butterfly book cannot be all things. The most interesting aspect of the book is the use of paintings of the butterflies (rather than photos) for about 80% of the species.  My recollection is that Klots' Field Guide to the Butterflies used paintings when it was issued in 1951, but I don't know of any butterfly guide that has done that since. The paintings make the book enjoyable for a person who already has seen lots of live butterflies and photos. Still, some species are not really recognizable from the paintings, such as the Pipevine Swallowtail.

I enjoyed the introductory pages.  Every butterfly books chooses different things to emphasize in the introduction, and this book had interesting sections on 19th-century Canada/US butterly books and on butterfly wing markings that are visible under UV light.

The writing in the species accounts is also kind of fun, as in this comment on the Painted Lady: "Just like ladybugs, half of them are men."

Early stages are not illustrated -- just adults.  

There are no range maps. Some accounts describe where the butterfly is found, while others do not.

The list of references and resources is quite short, which is perhaps reasonable if the book is aimed at the general reader. Louis Handfield's book 1999 book is mentioned, but not the second edition (2011). The TEA's 1991 "Ontario Butterfly Atlas" book is mentioned, but not the web-based Ontario Butterfly Atlas Online (available since 2011) or the web-based Maritimes Butterfly Atlas.

Maybe the photo on the cover is a Two-tailed Swallowtail, which is a western species not known from Ontario and Eastern Canada, but I will leave that for others to judge. The book does not say. It's a pretty photo, and I can see why it would be chosen for the cover.

320 pages. Price: $28.95 in Chapters stores (but not presently available online). Not listed on the amazon.ca site. It does not seem to be available from the publisher.

Alan Macnaughton

[Alan Macnaughton]

Correction: There are range maps in the book -- they are just a little inconspicuous, at the top of the page above the painting of the butterfly.

Alan