Butterflies by Matthew Oates

The Peacock: Britain's favourite butterfly

I happened on this book in a National Trust shop: it is in series of books published by the Trust which includes Apples, Beekeeping and Hedgerows among the other titles. There is no author's name on the cover, but when I opened it and found that it was by the Trust's renowned butterfly expert Matthew Oates I had high hopes. Oates was one of the key experts who helped Patrick Barkham achieve his goal of seeing all 59 British butterfly species in a single year, as reported in his deservedly popular book The butterfly isles.

Oates's book is subtitled "spotting and identifying Britain's butterflies", and it does both more and less than this would suggest. His real aim is obvious from the first chapter: it is to hook readers into appreciating "the wonder of butterflies". "We all need a conduit into nature", he says "... butterflying can fulfill that need". And I can personally vouch for his comment that it is "highly addictive".

To provide a context for the material on specific butterflies Oates reviews the history of butterflying, the key characteristics of butterflies (life cycle, flight seasons, mating and so on). He provides helpful general guidelines on identifying butterflies: master the easy, showy ones first; take account of habitats, food plants and flight periods; use binoculars. The last is very sound advice, and if offered with a humorous but unnecessarily defensive aside, "It also makes people think you are a birder, and not a weirdo." There are some specific suggestions for places to see butterflies and it turns out that with one exception every resident butterfly breeds on National Trust land.

Then there is an excellent short chapter on photographing butterflies which is full of very practical tips. You can almost feel the weight of experience that underpins it. There is even material on gardening for butterflies. And finally there are thoughts about the future, especially the impact of climate change and the weather: this dreadful wet year will surely turn out to be one of the worst for British butterflies.

In the midst of all this there is a directory of British butterflies, which also covers a few day-flying moths. Each butterfly gets half a page and there is a fold-out section with paintings of some of the most common. The commentaries on each are pithy and informative, but it is hard to see how you could really use this book as a practical guide to butterfly identification. For that you need more detail and photographs of both the upper wings and under wings of each species.

So this is a delightful, informative little book - all of the above is packed into less than a hundred pages - which is well worth reading by anybody with any level of interest in butterflies. I wish the NT had marketed it a bit better, rather than publishing it semi-anonymously in an interesting but slightly eccentric series. But more than that I wish that some publisher would commission Matthew Oates to produce the magnum opus on butterflies that he clearly has in him.

Matthew Oates - Butterflies (National Trust, 2011)