Butterflies of Michigan Field Guide

I pretty much love everything about this book, well almost everything. I was looking forward to identifying host plants to draw the butterflies that I most wanted to see. On each page, a few of the LARVAL host plants are listed for each butterfly but the ADULT host plants are all compacted onto a couple of pages at the end of book. And nowhere does it say which plants attract which butterflies. I was really disappointed about this as I wanted to plant specific butterfly-attracting plants in the hopes of attracting some of the more vibrant, perhaps lesser-seen butterflies. But since the plants are listed without telling which butterflies they most attract, I'm back at square one as far as planting my butterfly garden. Having said that, this book is GREAT for identifying butterflies. I've taken a lot of wildlife photos over the last 3 years and have some of butterflies I hadn't identified. After I got this book I was able to check off 16 different butterflies that I've personally seen (and photographed.) Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that there's a little box next to each butterfly in the index in the back of the book to check as you go, really neat. Overall, a great buy. It's my favorite book right now :o). Shelly Lyons, Taylor, MI

I picked this fieldguide up in the local bookstore after a quick lookover and decided to purchase it as it was selective for Michigan rather than the entire eastern North American of my other butterfly field guide. This book is easy to take in the field. Its dimensions are a portable 4 and 1/4 by 7 inches and compact despite its 376 pages. The species are organized by color which is both advantageous and a drawback in many ways. For example if you were trying to remember the difference between the Monarch and Viceroy it is easy to find them in the orange section and compare. On the other hand if you were in the field and saw a Common Checkered Skipper which is mostly black on the top of the wings with large white marks and mostly brown on the bottom of the wing (the part most often seen when they are perched on a plant) you might not look in the white color section where it is in this book. This applies to several other species such as the Tawny Crescent, is it in the orange or yellow section of the book? Other than the problem of organizing the book by color (which although imperfect my still be better than by taxonomic order for most people) the book is quite good. I liked the format with the description of the butterfly including eggs, larva, size, host plants, abundance, similar species and a range map of its locations in the state and chronology month by month of its appearance in the field opposite the picture. The large photographs of each species are excellent and well worth the price of the book. In some instances I would have liked to have included larger images of the lower wings, females etc. than the small 3/4 thumbnails in the corner of the large image. All in all a good little book for field identification of Michigan butterflies.

This book is very helpful when looking for host plants in Michigan.