Photographic Guide to Butterflies of Britain and Europe

This photographic guide to butterflies represents a completely new approach to field guides. It is aimed at those who wish to find and identify butterflies encountered in the field quickly and easily while promoting their conservation. The text is arranged alongside the four-color illustrations of the butterflies along with a map to show the distribution of the butterflies in Europe. The text is deliberately focused on features that complement the photographs and facilitate identification. All the photographs are of living butterflies in the positions in which they will be found in nature - if a butterfly only perches with its wings outspread, that is how it appears in the book; if a butterfly may perch either with its wings spread or folded, both views are shown - so that readers will be encouraged to preserve the ecology and conservation status of the butterflies. Stress is laid on the importance of exploiting all available information for locating and identifying butterflies - if two species look so similar that they cannot be identified without handling or dissection, the two species are distinguished by behavioral, geographical, or seasonal features in the text. This is the only guide that covers the whole of Europe, including the Canaries, Azores, Mediera and all the Aegean islands. It contains numerous unique photographs of species, subspecies, and forms that have never been published before.