Customer Reviews
Making Sense 
2008-06-05
Organization is the key to this excellent field guide. Butterflies are difficult to see clearly. This guide allows the observer to quickly get into the proper grouping or order, which is necessary before individual markings or behaviors can be noted. Good for anyone, I think this guide will be especially helpful for beginning butterfly watchers.
Best Butterfly Guide 2007-11-15
No, question, the best field guide to North American Butterflies on the market today. One can never have enough field guides, but this one should be at the top of your list!
Comprehensive guide 
2007-02-06
Easy format to use for quick identification. I bought it used; it was in great condition. Thanks!
butterfly watching 2007-01-07
Although it is thick and a hefty 392 pages, I take it along on our rv jaunts around the states. My wife is a big Petersons guide to birds fan so our binoculars are always on the ready. The illustrations are quality. I'd been using Petersons Butterflies but now only refer to this. For the money it's a good buy and good reference.
Unless you want it real fast, buy it here on Amazon for the best price.
An excellent field guide 2006-11-02
Published in 2003, Butterflies of North America is authored by Jim P. Brock and Kenn Kaufman. It is 384 pages. What makes this field guide distinctive in comparison with other photographic field guides is its utilization of photographs that have been digitally edited in order to facilitate the proper identification of its subjects. This field guide is set up in a practical manner, because while the text and range maps are situated on the left page, the butterflies are displayed on the right page. The text that is on the left page provides descriptive information on habitat, behavior, flight season, field marks, comparisons to similar butterflies, and larval foodplants; in addition, the common and scientific names of the butterflies are stated. Along with the photographs that are displayed on the right page, actual size silhouettes and field mark pointers are included. For select butterflies, photographs of larvae and pupae are shown, also. And if the sexes look different, both are photographically represented. This field guide includes a pictoral table of contents, a section on the identification of butterflies (with corresponding illustrations that point out the parts of a butterfly), a section on finding butterflies, a section dealing with the butterfly's life cycle, a classification and naming of butterflies section, a quick key to the range maps, and three indexes. These three indexes are an index of larval foodplants--the foodplants' common and scientific names are given--an index of scientific names of butterflies, and an index of common English names of butterflies. The index that consists of common English names of butterflies can also serve as a life list of the butterflies that you have identified, since there is a box next to each type of butterfly that can be checkmarked. There is a color key system that is included in order to make it simple to find the correct group of butterflies, too. This field guide does not stay on the bookshelf whenever I go butterflying. Butterflies of North America is a productive, excellent, and recommendable field guide.
Well organized reference 2006-08-23
The most user-friendly butterfly guide ever published, still handy and compact, now updated with the very latest information
- Follows the latest classification, recognizing more than forty additional species
- Includes four new color plates of Mexican-border rarities
- More than 2,300 images of butterflies in natural poses
- Pictorial table of contents
- Convenient one-page index
- Range maps on text pages
THE one volume field guide to North America's butterflies - and great for beginners! 2006-05-03
According to the preface, Kaufman Guides are "the best and fastest way to get started... to send you outside quickly, putting names on what you find". That was certainly true of the "Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America". Does it work here too?
Firstly, this is the only true field guide to cover every one of the 650 species regularly occurring north of the US-Mexican border. Other comprehensive books exist, like Scott's wonderful "The Butterflies of North America: A Natural History and Field Guide" (on Amazon: ISBN 0804720134), but they are really too heavy and not designed for the field. In contrast, this book is about the same size and shape as the well-known Peterson Field Guides, but with a hardier, flexible cover.
Unlike most Peterson Field Guides, however, the facing-page format allows illustrations, text, and map for each butterfly to be viewed simultaneously at one opening of the book. That is a major advantage. As for the illustrations, Kaufman opts for digitally enhanced photographs over paintings. There are more than 2,200 depictions of butterflies in natural conditions, all of them processed digital images based on photographs of live animals. The plates show the uppersides and undersides of most butterflies, both sexes are illustrated where they differ markedly, and regionally distinct forms are shown too. Range maps show where each species is common or rare and at what time of year.
At the end of the day this is a very welcome addition to the field guide literature and perhaps THE book to take into the field for identifying these insects, especially for beginners. Having said that, I would not be without the superb Peterson Field Guides "A Field Guide to Western Butterflies" and "A Field Guide to Eastern Butterflies" (on Amazon: ISBN 0395791529 & ISBN 0395904536 respectively) or the relevant volume of "Butterflies through Binoculars: The West" or "Butterflies through Binoculars: The East" (on Amazon: ISBN 0195106695 & ISBN 0195106687 respectively).
As for caterpillar identification, that is a whole new can of worms and would probably made this book twice as big, not to mention twice as long to write! My feeling is that it may be better to keep the two stages apart and interested readers should refer to the newish "Caterpillars in the Field and Garden : A Field Guide to the Butterfly Caterpillars of North America" (on Amazon: ISBN 0195149874).
The Kaufman Guides are a wonderful series - let's hope they keep expanding to cover new subjects.
The Ultimate Book For Easy Identification for Beginners 2006-04-21
There is one big problem with all Kaufman Focus Guides - they don't make a broad enough line of them! If I were able to have only 1 book on a given subject (birds, butterflies, mammals, etc.) I would always choose the Kaufman Focus Guide. I find their excellent pictures far superior to the illustrations that most books use, for one thing.
I shoot a lot of nature pictures and wanted to identify the butterfly and moth shots I was getting. I have several other guides - National Audubon Field Guide to Insects & Spiders - Golden Guide to Butterflies & Moths, Peterson First Guide to Butterflies & Moths. But the Kaufman book makes it easy to find and identify a species and to find the very subtle differences between very similar butterflies.
The pictorial table of contents makes it easy to understand various groupings of butterflies. I saw one review critical for the taxonomic system the book uses... the relevant thing for me, as an amateur, was to be able to quickly and easily make an identification and to have accurate information to distinguish between many different butterflies that look very much alike. This book definitely fills the bill. As another reviewer mentioned, it would certainly have been nice to have caterpillars included - but few things are perfect.
If you just want to identify butterflies - this is the book to get!
Butterflies of North America 
2006-03-02
It is not a good book because it uses NABA Taxonomic System instead of Lineus. It is missing manny information about the habitat, size, colours and their caterpillar.
Butterflies 2005-09-30
I checked out this book at the library so many times I thought I'd better get one of my own. Found it for the right price at Amazon.com. It's an excellent butterfly book for the novice identifying butterflies of North America.
