Monday, February 04, 2008

A butterfly guide for everyone - Part I

There you have it - a comprehensive (146 pixs), compact, friendly butterfly field guide specially for all of you who have attended our walks !


This guide is designed based on the feedbacks we have gathered over the years. It has taken us one and a half years to produce, much much longer than we expected.

When we started we thought it will be a piece of cake since there is not much text to be written and we already have most of the photos. How wrong were we ! First, deciding what species to include and to exclude is more challenging than we thought. We wanted a guide which will have 95% of the butterfly species we will likely to encounter during a walk. We could easily include all 280+ species but that will make the guide too bulky and too expensive. After many many email exchanges and we finally decided we will need somewhere around 150 species for the guide to meet our first objective.

Our next task was to come out with a layout that is handy and easy to use in the field. We looked to the many nature field guides in the market but we don't like what we saw. The traditional multi-folds leaflet type guides are too cumbersome to use in the field and will disintegrate into many pieces after repeated use. Other guides were too big to fit into our palm, shirt pocket or bags. Finally we decided on a 21mm x 90mm size fan-fold format which we believed is handy and easy to fold and unfold in the field.

To be continued ...

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