by Stamatis Ghinis, Vojsava Gjoni and Spyros Gkinis

Published by Princeton

ISBN: 978-960-99663-1-3

A Review by Guy Padfield, 28th March 2014

This is an unpretentious book with many serious failings but also some points to commend it - notably its worthy goal of raising awareness among residents and visitors to the island of issues of environmental protection and biodiversity conservation.

The largest part of the book comprises a photographic guide to the butterflies of Corfu and it is here that it most obviously fails. The authors themselves admit some of the photos are really not very good. What they don't say is that many of them are of what appear to be dead insects, rather clumsily posed in nature in most un-lifelike attitudes. There is a touching naivety to this but it is obviously a mistake, not only because it looks dreadful but perhaps more importantly because it implies a rather casual disrespect of the insects themselves. Neither the pictures nor the extremely brief accompanying descriptions offer any pointers for distinguishing confusing species and they are sometimes actively misleading. The two Osiris Blues shown (both dead, one propped up on a leaf, the other on a flower) are almost identical to the two Mazarine Blues a few pages later and in my opinion all four are Mazarine. The texts for Grizzled Skipper and Oberthur's Grizzled Skipper are identical and neither picture shows either the hindwing upperside or the salient features of the underside. It would be childish of me to go on. If you are serious about butterflies and are planning a trip to Corfu, you will need to take an identification guide and this book is not it.

Now to why you might want to take the Butterflies of Corfu along too. The authors spent 7 years recording butterflies at 47 sites around the island, clearly marked on a map near the beginning of the book. The only useful bit of the species descriptions is a list of all the stations where they found the species in question. That genuinely could be very helpful, especially if, like me, you rely on public transport and two feet - it's like having 7 years' worth of trip reports from people who've already done a lot of the legwork for you. If you want to see Lattice Brown, for example, you can see exactly where the authors found it. I have the impression they came to the whole exercise as beginners, with little real knowledge or understanding of butterflies; but they did the work and there is some useful stuff in here.