United States
£ GBP
This beautifully illustrated field guide covers caterpillars of the moth and butterfly species that are most likely to be encountered in the British Isles. The helpful introduction includes information on caterpillar structure and function, behaviour and evolution, while the species accounts cover status, field characters, similar species, habitat, foodplant and field notes, and are accompanied with up-to-date distribution maps.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Useful resources
At-a-glance guide
Plate section
Checklist of the macro-moths and butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland
Scientific names of plants and their associated butterfly and moth species
Photographic credits
Appendices
Index of English names
Index of scientific names
Barry Henwood has devoted much of his entomological time over the past 40 years to rearing larvae of macro-moths, and to furthering an understanding of their life histories, and is one of just a handful of experts in Britain in this area.
Phil Sterling is a lifelong lepidopterist and is the senior author of the Field Guide to the Micro-Moths of Great Britain and Ireland.
Richard Lewington is an acknowledged leader in the field of insect illustration. His meticulous paintings of wildlife are the mainstay of many of the modern classics of field-guide art, including The Butterflies of Britain and Ireland, Guide to Garden Wildlife and Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland. Richard has also designed and illustrated wildlife stamps for several countries. In 1999 he was awarded Butterfly Conservation's Marsh Award for the promotion of Lepidoptera conservation, and in 2010 the Zoological Society of London's Stamford Raffles Award for contribution to zoology.
"We are living through a golden age of insect field guides, and much of the credit is due to British Wildlife Publishing (BWP), begun a quarter of a century ago by Andrew Branson. This book, the latest in that stable, forms part of the Bloomsbury Wildlife Guides series [...] This is an eagerly awaited field guide. The previous guide to caterpillars, by Jim Porter, published in 1997, is long out of print, and it used photographs based on 35 mm transparencies. That was quite an achievement for the time, but the present guide should be much easier to use and more likely to lead to a correct identification [...] I hope and expect that this book’s publication will shift the focus from moth traps and adults to their younger stages (at one time some moths were better known as caterpillars than as adults, as will be obvious from their names). Perhaps the rearing of caterpillars will offer us one more thing we can do while we sit in our homes and wait for the coronavirus danger to subside."
– Peter Marren, British Wildlife 31(5), June 2020
"A much-needed guide – you can't truly understand a moth or a butterfly without first getting to know the caterpillar."
– Nick Baker
