Amazon Insects - A Photo Guide  •  James L. Castner FIELD GUIDE •  2000 •  PAPER  • 160 PAGES A guide to spectacular, weird, and commonly encountered insects of the Amazon basin. Geared for the traveler, this handy book features 200 color photographs. Each species gets a handsome portrait, and accompanying text, including a brief description in Spanish. The diversity of bugs, butterflies, katydids, leafhoppers, ants, bees, spiders and other brilliantly colored and camouflaged species in the Amazon basin is astounding. This book presents some personal favorites of the author, and it's quite a bestiary. (AMZ63, $20.00)
A Birder's Bug Book  •  Gilbert Waldbauer NATURAL HISTORY •  2000 •  PAPER  • 336 PAGES It's a bird-eat-bug world out there -- and this charming professor of entomology at the University of Illinois tells us why. Apart from the inherent interest in who is eating whom, the book gives an excellent overview of ecology and evolution, particularly co-evolutionary strategies. Some really big bugs have been known to eat birds. (NAT12, $16.95)
Butterflies in Flight  •  Roger Camp ART & ARCHITECTURE •  2002 •  HARD COVER  • 104 PAGES Hyperreal photographs of butterflies, achieved with a butterfly net, a scanner and Photoshop. Camp, who collected butterflies from around the world for this handsome art book, sets the images against a black background. It's an accordion-folded book in a slipcase, more in the category of art than science. (NAT58, $27.50)
Chasing Monarchs, A Migration with the Butterflies of Passage  •  Robert Michael Pyle NATURAL HISTORY •  2001 •  PAPER  • 307 PAGES A memoir of Lepidoptery, combing the entomologist-author's considerable knowledge of butterflies and their biology with a rambling road trip from British Columbia through the Southwest to Mexico. (MEX62, $14.00)
Four Wings and a Prayer, Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly  •  Sue Halpern NATURAL HISTORY •  2002 •  PAPER  • 212 PAGES A lyrical account of travels and encounters on the trail of the migrating monarch. Halpern who weavers her own experiences with science, interviews and commentary, includes a section on the butterfly wintering grounds in Mexico. (NAT52, $13.00)
Insects Through the Seasons  •  Gilbert Waldbauer NATURAL HISTORY •  1998 •  PAPER  • 304 PAGES An elegant overview of the world from a bug's-eye view. Ostensibly covering the life cycle of a cecropid moth, it interweaves stories of insect behavior revolving around (of course) food, sex and home. With line drawings and a clever flip-book illustrating the flight of a moth. (NAT13, $14.95)
Millions of Monarchs, Bunches of Beetles: How Bugs Find Strength in Numbers  •  Gilbert Waldbauer SCIENCE •  2001 •  PAPER  • 272 PAGES A fascinating collection of essays by a spirited entomologist on the occasional gathering of monarchs, ladybugs, locusts and other not-so-social insects. Delightful and instructive. (BUG10, $16.95)
Monarchs  •  Kathryn Lasky  •  Christopher Knight NATURAL HISTORY •  1993 •  PAPER  • 63 PAGES • MIDDLE READERS (Age 9-12) An introduction to the monarch butterfly, written for middle-school age children. Discussions of migration patterns are complemented by beautiful color photographs, making this an enjoyable, educational book. (BST51, $12.00)