Moths of Western North America

As a general naturalist, my former journeys to England would end with a suitcase packed to its limits of field guides and other works of natural history not easily (or not at all) available in the United States. And amongst the most prized of these were the remarkable guides from Bloomsbury to the Lepidoptera – particularly moths – illustrated by Richard Lewington. I dreamt longingly of such works becoming available for the U.S. Thus, when David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie’s Peterson Field Guide to the Moths of Northeastern North America was published in 2012, I thought I’d won the lottery. With it being followed by the team’s Peterson Guide to the Moths of Southeastern North America, I was confident that a volume to cover my home area in western North America would one day be published.

Then Houghton Mifflin imploded, and with it the great tradition of the Peterson Guides breathed it’s penultimate breath.

Oh a few were picked up and continued under the Mariner Books imprint of Harper Collins, but it was clear from conversations with authors of still in-the-works books who had their contracts nullified that many such long awaited books would never be published, and others, such as the previously mentioned Moths of Southeastern North America would be taken out of print. It was dark days indeed for U.S. based naturalists.

But wait, who’s that riding boldly towards us on a sleek white steed bedecked in gleaming silver-trimmed reins? A lone female rider wearing an earth-tone, hand-knitted cardigan dramatically flapping behind her in the wind and a bulging tote-bag full of books in her hand? It’s Princeton University Press, come to our rescue!

OK, perhaps I’m being a bit over dramatic. But as a naturalist, it certainly felt like that when I learned of the publication of Seabrooke Leckie‘s long awaited (and, if I’m honest, prayed for) Moths of Western North America as a new addition to the growing Princeton Field Guide series. Encompassing nineteen hundred species of the most common moth species in western North America (and that tells you something right there about just how many actual species there are if trimming down to the most common still totals nineteen hundred), this new guide fills nearly seven hundred pages with over two thousand photographs of, and supporting maps and information about, its profiled species.

To write that I’m pleased that this book has finally been brought to publication is like writing that Henry VIII had minor marital commitment challenges; I’m positively giddy with excitement. And I suspect that if you’re also a moth enthusiast you will be as well.