Book Reviews

Glorious Butterflies and their Flora

Butterfly Conservation 1993. Ed. D Dunbar. Ill. V Baines. £12.50 If like me you are a soft target for gorgeously-illustrated books on natural history, waste no further time. This is a beautiful production worthy of any one's bookshelf. Valerie Baines has excelled herself with a series of Victorian-style plates featuring butterflies and their principal larval foodplants and nectar flowers, whilst the (minimal) commentary is provided by a number of for the most part unsung amateur experts, furnishing nuggets of information more often buried in the comprehensivity of dedicated textbooks. Every resident British butterfly is featured, plus some migrant and extinct species. They are categorised under general headings such as 'Butterflies in the Garden', 'Grassland Butterflies' and 'Vanishing Butterflies', making a pleasant change from the usual more scientific groupings. If I have a complaint to make it is that the prints themselves are so wonderful that they might have been offered in a folio together with the book. Maybe they will be. Otherwise my overall judgment is - congratulations, wish I'd done it myself ...

Last Chance to See

Pan Books 1991. Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine. £5.99 In.case anyone doesn't know, Douglas Adams is the author of 'A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'- intelligent, witty, an acknowledged master of the bathetic apercu - and self-confessedly quite unaware before writing this book of the accelerating toll of environmental destruction and extinct wildlife being exacted by Man on this planet. We have Mark Carwardine, the well-known author of The WWF Environmental Handbook (inter alia) to thank for Dougie's belated enlightenment, and between them the two have produced a very readable and comparatively light-hearted travelogue of the world's more threatened environments and wildlife. These range from Komodo Island and its dragons (how well do I remember David Attenborough's original Zoo Quest to that fabled isle) to Mauritius, home of the ex-Dodo and soon-to-be-late Pink Pigeon and Kestrel, via a number of other more or less exotic locations, all featuring animals that may no longer shortly be with us. It's a very good book of its kind, well written and amusing without losing sight of the tragic and otherwise depressing subject matter. Just the job for any of your friends who have not yet taken on board how late in the day it really is to save the planet. Andrew Phillips