Britain’s Insects
| Paul D Brock | WILDGuides (Princeton University Press) | 2021 | Paperback | 608 Pages | 2600+ Colour Photos | 1222 Maps | ISBN: 9780691179278 | £25.00p |
The Publisher’s View:
Features include:
- More than 2,600 stunning photographs, carefully selected to show key identification features
- guides to every insect order, covering 316 families and almost 850 genera
- Covers 1,653 species, of which 1,476 are illustrated
- Designed to allow easy, accurate comparison of similar species
- Up-to-date distribution maps and charts summarizing adult seasonality
- QR codes that link to sound recordings of grasshoppers and crickets
- Information on photographing and recording insects to help conservation
Britain’s Insects is an innovative, up-to-date, carefully designed and beautifully illustrated field guide to Britain and Ireland’s twenty-five insect orders, concentrating on popular groups and species that can be identified in the field. Featuring superb photographs of live insects, the guide covers the key aspects of identification and provides information on status, distribution, seasonality, habitat, food plants and behaviour. It also offers insight into the life history of the various insect groups, many of which are truly amazing. This is the go-to guide for entomologists, naturalists, gardeners, wildlife photographers and anyone else interested in insects, whatever their level of knowledge.
The Author: Paul D. Brock is an entomologist and a scientific associate at the Natural History Museum, London. Most at home in the field, he spends much of his time watching and studying insects in great detail in order to learn more about them and to record their behaviour on camera. A renowned author of insect books and a widely published photographer, he is a world authority on stick-insects and leaf-insects, with a genus and several species named after him.
Fatbirder View:
Fatbirder followers will know I like really rate WILDGuides books and I’ve been waiting on this one. I have all of their series including more specialist ones on hoverflies and bees etc as they are an interest, but I often come across other insects and badly wanted a generalist guide that is more comprehensive than most generic guides. This one is it in spades!
I have little to add to the publisher’s description except that it’s easy to use and one soon gets used to which species are from which family so turning to the right place to search a section comes pretty easily. I’d always rather have line drawings or water colours as per scientific illustrations, but these photos are more consistent than most both in terms of quality and comparison poses, so I’d give it the ‘best in class’ rosette.
Every UK household should have this to satisfy their own curiosity and make sure the kids get to love insects, as they are essential to like on earth.
Fatbirder