Here are my impressions of a couple field guides that came in the mail yesterday
Insects of the Pacific Northwest. 2006. Peter and Judy Haggard. Timber Press, Portland.
Encyclopedia of Tracks and Scat. 2004. Len McDougall. Lyon Press, Guilford, CT.
Timber Press is usually pretty dependable when it comes to producing regional field guides and Peter and Judy Haggard's new insect guide certainly qualifies as a nice little regional field guide. When placed in a head-to-head against the Lone Pine analog Bugs of Oregon and Washington it wins hands down (Lone Pine can be pretty hit-or-miss ranging from the indispensable Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast and Amphibians of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia to the down right useless Birds of the Pacific Northwest Coast).
Where Bugs comes in at 160 pages with only one critter per page illustrated competently by Ian Sheldon, Insects comes in at 295 pages with photographs of several species per page. The front 20% is beetles, easily the most comprehensive and useful section. It includes many of my favorites (Calligrapha multipunctata, Ellychnia hatchi) though Rain beetles (Pleocoma) and the snail-eating Scaphinotus are curiously absent....
The Lep section is the largest section and includes plenty of caterpillars. The overly linear may find the sorted-by-size format that mixes the moths with the butterflies and discards taxonomic formalities
a bit frustrating. There is, however, a key at the front that most non-entemologists will have no trouble using to navigate the text since we have no expectations about what the order should be.
The most interesting section has photos of insect galls from wasps and gall midges. Dragonflies, true flies and most aquatic species (mayflies, stoneflies, etc) are woefully under represented. The non-insect invertebrates section seems almost tacked on as an after-thought.
I'm sure that entemology purists will find plenty to complain about, just as ornithology purists complain about what's missing in bird guides and botany purists complain about omissions in plant guides, but for the rest of us- a regional guide with at least 100 beetle photographs will prove to be well worth buying.
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McDougal's Tracks and Scat, however, was a major disappointment. One presumes that a work with the word "encyclopedia" in it would live up to its subtitle, "a comprehensive guide to trackable animals in the United States and Canada". It certainly covers plenty of animals, but it's hardly comprehensive. There are very few photos and most of them are of poor quality and difficult to make out details. The black-and-white drawings of various species are done in a style that's so amateurish that some of the drawings are laugh-out-loud funny (the bobcat and wolverine are particularly sad). The track drawings are better than the animal drawings, but I would argue that Ian Sheldon's back-pocket guide Animal Tracks of Washington and Oregon (1997 Lone Pine Press) is a much better (and less expensive) reference if one is looking for a straight animal track guide.
Perhaps most annoying is that even though the word scat is in the title, there are only a couple of photos of scat and a couple of crappy drawings. The "comprehensive" descriptions of scat for most species amounts to a couple sentences that do next to nothing to help the tracker differentiate cats from dogs from mustellids. It is in this regard that one feels most egregiously ripped off.
So, don't be fooled. Leave this book on the shelf and let it go quietly out of print....
Posted by mbalame at March 20, 2007 4:02 PM