Kaufman Field Guide to Butterflies of North America

ENJOYING BUTTERFLIES A Note from Kenn Kaufman Most people seem to be aware of butter'ies more as symbols than as real living creatures. Although there are hundreds of species of butterflies in North America, they somehow escape public notice most of the time. Out in plain sight, they lead secret lives. I still recall how surprised I was when I began to notice them myself. At the age of fourteen, having learned a lot of my local birds, I decided to see if there were any butterflies in the neighborhood. Amazingly, as soon as I began looking for them, they appeared: Little Wood-Satyrs flopping through the woods, tiny Reakirt"s Blues on weed flowers in vacant lots, and dozens more. Although I had been outside looking for birds, up to that time I had utterly missed these other winged creatures. Butterflies are not birds, of course. They are very different in their habits, yearly cycles, and population dynamics. And they"re a lot smaller. The biggest ones, like Monarchs and Giant Swallowtails, may grab our attention, but most of the diversity is among the smaller butterflies. We have far more species of little hairstreaks, blues, skippers, and the like than we do of the big guys. Small can be beautiful: even the tiniest butterflies have intricate patterns that are well worth appreciating. But until recently, it has been extremely difficult to identify many of these butterflies in the field. Even separating some larger species has been problematic, because their identification often depends on small details. Until the recent development of good close-focusing binoculars and cameras, many butterflies could be recognized only by expert lepidopterists with vast experience. I have been lucky enough to have one such lepidopterist as a good friend for years, and luckier still that he is the kind of expert who is always ready to share his knowledge. Jim Brock has studied butterflies from Alaska to Brazil, and in the field he dazzles everyone with his ability to find and identify even the rare and little-known species; but he will also patiently point out the most common butterflies to anyone who wants to know them. Jim agreed to coauthor this book as a way of helping new- comers to the field. In doing so, he graciously accepted the challenge of our Focus Guide format: boiling his vast knowledge down to just the essentials that would be most useful in a pocket-sized book. If any serious lepidopterists are displeased by the treatments here, they should blame me, not Jim Brock. But of course serious lepidopterists (who already have their technical reference works) are not the primary audience for this book. The Focus Guides are shortcuts, intended to be the best and fastest way to get started in a subject, to send you outside quickly, putting names on what you find. Slip this book into your pocket the next time you go exploring, and start discovering the secret world of butterflies for yourself. IDENTIFYING BUTTERFLIES In naming a butterfly, the first step is to make sure that it really is one. The order Lepidoptera includes the moths as well as the butterflies, and some moths are active by day and are quite colorful. Usually they sit or behave in an obviously different way from butterflies. If in doubt, look at the antennae. On butterflies, the tip of each antenna has a thickened area, or "club." North American moths lack this feature; their antennae are either threadlike to the tip, feathery, or fringed along the edges. Butterflies have four wings: two on each side, the forewing and the hindwing. The upperside and underside of each wing usually has a different pattern. To describe a color pattern on a butterfly, therefore, we have to say where it is - for example, on the upperside of the foreKaufman, Kenn is the author of 'Kaufman Field Guide to Butterflies of North America ' with ISBN 9780618254002 and ISBN 0618254005.