Butterflies of British Columbia

Duncan Robertson is a former professor of English at Queen’s
University.

A labor of love on a grand scale, The Butterflies of British Columbia
must make lepidopterists in that province the envy of lepidopterists
everywhere else. A long introduction includes sections on butterfly
conservation, butterfly gardening, the morphology and biology of
butterflies (the latter with particularly interesting subsections on
behavior and mortality), the redistribution of species in British
Columbia after the last ice age, and the history of the study of B.C.
butterflies. The writing is clear, but would have been so without the
high degree of repetitiousness often resorted to.

The main part of the book comprises individual accounts of the 187
species of butterflies (including skippers) recorded in British Columbia
or in adjacent areas and so likely to be eventually recorded in British
Columbia. The authors are emphatically splitters rather than lumpers:
subspecies are acknowledged (several new ones are designated, in fact),
and what many treat as merely different subspecies they treat as
different species.

Each species is superbly illustrated by photographs of pinned specimens
showing the upper and lower sides of the male and often, as well, one or
both sides of the female, and sometimes one or both sides or sexes of
the subspecies. Each specimen has been photographed individually, so the
scale of each photograph can always be large enough, but no larger than
necessary, for identifying the species. The actual wingspan of the
specimen is given in centimetres. Often, in addition, there are
photographs of live specimens in natural settings: adults, larvae,
pupae, and occasionally eggs. A few drawings of genitalia are included
for species not otherwise easily identifiable.

The text draws attention to the distinctive features of each species,
usually including those of the larva, pupa, and sometimes eggs, and
briefly describes its behavior and life history, noting the known
foodplants. There are bar graphs indicating, over the flight season, the
relative frequency of the occurrences of adults, and unusually clear
distribution maps indicating the locality of confirmed records by
colored dots (with the subspecies indicated by dots of different
colors). The book’s large format requires that the text be distributed
in double columns, but this allows for the convenient integration of
text and pictures on the same page.

The etymology of the names of each species is explained or speculated
about, and this includes, most unusually, the common name as well as the
scientific. Sometimes the common name is amended to conform with the
intentions of the author of the species in giving the scientific name.
(The argument is not always quite persuasive: “Alberta fritillary”
as the common name of Clossiana alberta cannot be amended to
“Albert’s fritillary” on the attractive theory that the author
intended to honor Prince Albert, for then he would surely have named the
species Clossiana alberti.) The authors do not venture, as might be
expected in so thorough a book, any rules for the proper English
pronunciation of the scientific names.

Sources are scrupulously full, and acknowledged economically, not in
footnotes, but by parenthetic references to the entries in a long
appended bibliography.