The Butterflies of the British Isles (ebook)
/I enjoyed browsing through The Butterflies of the British Isles by Richard South on Internet Archive (here). It was published in 1906 by Frederick Warne & Co. – the publisher of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit.
The butterfly illustrations are excellent with males and females…the different sides of the wings…and caterpillars.
The Camberwell Beauty is familiar to us in North America; we call it the Mourning Cloak. One of the highlights of the illustrations was the inclusion of magnified images of the eggs of most of the butterflies. They are so tiny that most of the time they appear like spheres to us (when we notice them at all) but with the right equipment, they are not all spheres and sometimes the shape is unique enough to identify the species that laid the egg!
Back in 2013, I photographed a Mourning Cloak in our plum tree in early April. It looks so battered that it was probably one that overwintered.
Note: I am finding so many interesting eBooks right now that I’ve decided to do one post per week rather than accumulating 3 for a monthly post. So – enjoy an online book-of-the-week going forward!
