An excellent guide with superb illustrations. Highly recommended.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76015 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

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Customer Reviews

Unbeatable
This is a truly fantastic book. Great organization, excellent, detailed text on the full range of species, and inspired illustrations by the brilliant Richard Lewington.

Simply superb - THE field guide to moths
Descriptions of all c900 species of "macro" moth of Britain and Ireland with 880 species depicted in 1660 illustrations. This guide now replaces South (1961) and Skinner (1984, 1998) as the standard field guide. The plates are quite simply stunning - not just for their wealth of observed detail, but also because of their intrinsic beauty. As for the text, it is concise and clear. This is the first time comparative information has been provided in a moth guide in the form of a "similar species" section - and very helpful it is too. I have only used this guide briefly on a recent trip to the UK, but I was very impressed and look forward to using it further on future visits.

If I had to nominate my favourite guide to butterflies and moths of any region, this would be it. It deserves to be on the shelves of any naturalist.

Good but not perfect
When I started mothing I learnt identification from the Skinner volume. As has been said in other reviews Skinner gives no help in the text to sort the moths out. What is more, although the moths are photographed the reproduction is not good so details are lost along with your temper.

The book by Waring et al sorts a lot of this out as the paintings done by Richard Lewington are superb. The moths sit as you see them and shape is a large factor in identification. The text helps a great deal too telling you the important points to look for in identification. It also supplies details on range, emergence time and how common they are all of which help a lot during use.

The layout of the moths through the book follows that given in the British checklist. This is identical to that in other books so moving from one volume to another is easy if confirmation is required. It is also a handbook so it will fit in your pocket.

There are one or two problems. The first is the layout of the book. The pictures are not scattered through the book along with text relevant to each species, they are provided in four groups. Immediately you have trouble finding the pictures. I have ended up marking the site of the pictures with tabs of insulating tape just so that I can locate them. Then starting from a picture of moth, is the text for that species positioned in front or later in the book? Could be either. This may sound silly but time is precious when the moth may disappear any scond! If you are going to group the pictures, I think putting them all in a single group, at the back of the book makes far more sense.
Second for many species the text supplies "similar species". This is a good idea but some of the "similar species" do not look similar at all! In other cases they state "no similar species" and this simply is not true. Some identification problems could have been taken further as there are some groups of moths like: Uncertain, Rustic, Powdered Rustic, Vines rustic etc which are a nightmare to tell apart. They have tried reasonably well but perhaps a small section of text and a table describing the key points may be the way forward.
A third point is the inclusion of pictures of caterpillars. A good idea but you have to put ALL the caterpillars in for it to make sense. Indeed there is another book that does this so why bother wasting space in this way?
Despite all this twining on, I think it is the best Macro moth out there by far so I thoroughly recommend it.