| ISBN: | 0-88192-689-2 |
| Price: | US$24.95 |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pages: | 296 pp. |
| Dimensions: | 5.75 x 8.25 in (145 x 210 cm) |
| Illustrations: | 740 color photos, 1 b/w illustrations |
| Copyright: | ©2006 Timber Press |
| Publication Date: | March 20, 2006 |
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Reviewed by Luurt Nieuwenhuis
Everyone’s backyard is full of and flying, creeping, crawling, and oozing things. Most people have at least a passing familiarity with finches, jays, robins, and swallows. A few people know that Arcyria, Badhamia, Comatrichia, and Lycogala, sometimes ooze in the hidden places. These latter are members of the Mycetozoa kingdom of life forms. Then there are the members of the Insecta, commonly known as bugs, insects, moths, and butterflies.
Peter Haggard and Judy Haggard have put together a guidebook that combines the best parts of the insect world into one guidebook. It covers the most common insects that are local to the Pacific Northwest and are most likely to be seen in our area. There is no sense in trying to match up to a picture of the midmexican mollycoddle mothra if it never comes further north than Rio Linda once every 100 years.
Guidebooks for the insects and their allies come in all sizes, shapes, and thoroughness. The most complete ones are large scientific tomes that only professional entomologists can use and large libraries can afford. The smallest ones are made for preschoolers and leave out 99% of what you are trying to look up. Some are thorough on one part (such as insects) but leave others out (such as butterflies).
Insects of the Pacific Northwest is arranged on a picture-based system. Find a group that matches the body plan characteristics of what you’re trying to identify. Then go to that section and match up the picture to the insect. Beetles are different from ‘true bugs’, moths, butterflies, and dragonflies. The key has sections for each of these.
Once you look at the first level of identification pictures, it is easy to decide which is which. Moths and butterflies have distinct identifying characters as do the true bugs and beetles. Of course, getting down to the species and subspecies level in identification is not quite so easy. Many of the moths and butterflies have their baby (larva) pictures included. That helps a lot. But some groups are so difficult for the layman to identify that the key does not even attempt to portray them which keeps the book friendly to use.
There is a fascinating section in the key on galls. I had always thought that galls were the result of virus infections on plants. But Peter Haggard’s pictures demonstrate that they are the consequence of minute fly and wasp invasions. Some galls are result from a plant’s defensive reaction to the invasion, but most are the triggered by the plant’s response to specific chemical secretions of the invading insect. As an aside, there is a delightful book called “The Love of Insects” by Thomas Eisner devoted to the chemical warfare carried on in the bug and beetle world.
God must have an inordinate fondness of beetles because there are between 2 million and 80 million species worldwide: Probably no identification book will ever be complete. There are a lot of books identifying insects that will never be encountered in the Northwest. Insects of the Pacific Northwest is excellently balanced, portraying the moths, butterflies, bugs, insects, and other Insecta that are likely to be encountered in our region. It goes into my field kit first.