One of my all-time favorite “field guides” is not so much a field guide but I’ll list it first anyway: www.BugGuide.net! They’re where I go to see if there are any genera in my area weren’t in the field guides I have (like the Florida Oakworm, Anisota consularis) or to learn about insects I don’t have a proper field guide for.
All my favorite actual “field guides” are for bugs n birds in the east or southeast US:
I love the Golden Field Guides. The Birds of North America has been my go-to book since I was a kid. They are compact, have illustrations instead of photos, and those wonderful little maps! As well as a brief description.
Two thumbs up so far. Plenty of delicious details about bursa numbers in female noctuids to wow all of your friends at the next cocktail party you attend. Obviously, I don’t get out much . Seriously, I’m a blossoming amateur (micro-)lepidopterist with no significant academic training and relatively new to the subject area. I find the book an excellent balance between heavy jargon or technical writing and a pleasant, captivating highly informational writing style. I’m half way through (doesn’t need to be read in order!!!) and I can already rattle off factoids and explain them to you. Beautiful photos and nice inclusion of globally common species along with neat rarities make this text both interesting and useful in the field or lab. Especially if you’re an improvising, wanna-be behavioral ecologist keen on solving mysteries like an overgrown Encyclopedia Brown.
Update: because of this thread my resource collection has happily increased. Spider books and NewcombThanks everyone so far for participating in a great thread.
Although not a field guide, BONAP is great for getting an idea of what plants occur where: http://bonap.org/ http://bonap.net/NAPA/Family/Phylogenetic/County
The maps are based off of collections so it’s possible that a species recorded in one county can be in neighboring counties if they don’t appear to have records.
I’m working on mosses lately, and I’d like to put a word in for “Mosses, Liverworts and Hornworts” by Ralph Pope. I went with this one over McKnight based on user reviews (though I’m sure that one is great too) suggesting I might like Pope’s approach to structuring the book better. Taking a sort of “whatever works best” approach to keying things into major groups, then providing family/subsection keys within that, and finer grained keys OR trait-comparison charts or just a detailed explanation. The author’s tone is quite personable, as well.
Of course, this guide focuses on the common mosses of the northeast, with an emphasis on those typical of the geology of the atlantic slope. I’m doing a bit of work in habitats known or suspected to harbor specialist mosses on rather different great-lakes-midwest geology, so a general guide will only get me so far- but it’s still a great start and will usually at least get me to the right family or even genus. From there I can putter around with the glitchy online Flora of North America material. As proper technical floras published for mosses are really quite expensive (and mostly getting a bit old now), this is a much more accessible approach.
A note on Sphagnum, though- Pope’s section on sphagnum is decent but at times relies a bit heavily on habitat clues (pH in particular) that may not be known to the user or clear-cut in the field. Sometimes you’re trying to use the moss species to indicate the habitat, not the other way around! Pope provides a few pointers on indicative microscopic traits, but not consistently, and suggests some (teres vs. squarrossum) are harder than they really are. While not quite a “Field Guide,” I picked up a used copy of Howard Crum’s “A Focus on Peatlands and Peat Mosses.” It’s actually quite accessible and contains a wealth of information on ecological succession in peatlands- really illuminating the processes underlying the habitats you can observe- and very detailed, useful illustrations of microscopic traits so that anyone with access to a compound scope can make confident identifications.
My favorite guide is Wild Orchids of the Canadian Maritimes and Northern Great lakes Region by Paul Martin Brown. Orchids are my favorite taxon and so it is like a bucket list. The most useful one currently is Flora of New Brunswick by Hinds.
I am very frustrated with the current trend for field guides to go to photographs. Sure, a skilled photographer can take some exquisite digital images – but where those guides fall short is in (a) comprehensiveness, i.e. covering all or most of the species in the area, and (b) how to distinguish visually similar species.
Few things frustrate me more in a field guide than seeing a picture of, say, one species of hermit hummingbird, and then the text says that two other species of hermits also occur in the area, and sometimes not even a description of how to tell them apart. Oh, but the photograph of the one is beautiful! This kind of guide is practically useless to me. Give me the Peterson system, where all three of those hermits will be shown illustrated side by side, in the same position, with arrows pointing to their field marks.
Wildflower guides are even worse in this regard. Line drawings are the way to go with those, but yet most of the more recent guides have jumped on the digital photography trend – more style than substance.
Agree. Big Peterson fan. I use those photo-based plant guides for garden design because of just that. Especially when your skills aren’t amazing it can be nice to have the drawings without subjective light and angles and color in printing and such.
I hear your complaint about guides that focus on pretty photos and neglect actual information (what a waste!), but I think that photographs taken by a botanist with ID characteristics specifically in mind are an invaluable addition to illustrations.
This past summer when the spring bird migration was over I started looking for dragonflies and damselflies in Northeast Ohio. I knew some birders who switched to insects over the summer. And, there is a dragonfly survey here in Ohio that uses iNaturalist.
I purchased a guidebook for the dragonflies and damselflies of Northeast Ohio. It is published by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Almost all of the contributors are from this area. It is cool to look through the book and see their names and the photos that they took. It has a lot of good information including range maps of just the surrounding counties.
One thing I really like about it is that it is a spiral-bound book. I think other guidebooks should be this way.
I hear what you are saying. I think a problem is that ordinary people may not be interested going in-depth about the nitty-gritty differences compared to someone who has been studying a subject for years.
Funny you mention that, in that specific region, for that specific taxon. I have the spiral-bound guide to the dragonflies of Cleveland Metroparks, from the one summer I spent there.
For the central region of North America - where I live - the North Woods field guides from Kollath-Stensaas are my go-to. The challenge here is that our region is split between two countries and is at the remote edges of three sub-national jurisdictions (Manitoba, Minnesota and Ontario)…not to mention, the junction of three major ecoregions (Great Lakes Forest, Boreal Shield and Tall-grass Prairie). A guide limited to one sub-national jurisdiction or one ecoregion often fails to cover all the expected species in enough detail, while muddying the waters with many species that do not occur here. The North Woods guides are one of the few series that cover the full range of species across all the borders, natural and political.
My favorites:
Butterflies of the North Woods - Larry Weber - ISBN 9780967379357 Dragonflies of the North Woods - Kurt Mead - ISBN 9781936571116 Damselflies of the North Woods - Robert DuBois - ISBN 9780967379371
Have to add: the binding on these books is rock solid. (I’m a librarian - poor-quality binding is a major pet peeve.) My copy of Dragonflies has had a tremendous amount of wear and tear, and is still intact.
. Seriously, I’m a blossoming amateur (micro-)lepidopterist with no significant academic training and relatively new to the subject area. I find the book an excellent balance between heavy jargon or technical writing and a pleasant, captivating highly informational writing style. I’m half way through (doesn’t need to be read in order!!!) and I can already rattle off factoids and explain them to you. Beautiful photos and nice inclusion of globally common species along with neat rarities make this text both interesting and useful in the field or lab. Especially if you’re an improvising, wanna-be behavioral ecologist keen on solving mysteries like an overgrown Encyclopedia Brown.
