Nic Bishop Butterflies and Moths (review)

Bishop is rapidly becoming the go-to guy for crowd-pleasing photographic nature study, and his subjects here are some of the most photogenic critters you'll find. As in previous titles in this sequence (Nic Bishop Frogs, BCCB 3/08), the book combines arresting photographs with explanatory prose rich in fascinating detail ("One feeds on the tears of sleeping animals. Another drinks blood"). The text covers the all-important topic of metamorphosis, of course, but also discusses feeding and predation, migration, and reproduction. Though the text has the occasional glitch (readers never find out which creatures have those unusual feeding habits, for instance), it's richly informative. The real draw here, though, is the art: even for Bishop, the photographs are breathtaking, with images of astounding delicacy, intricacy, and sheer weirdness in close-ups that reveal the lemon-colored fernlike fronts of a moth's antennae, the spiky jelly-colored and -textured globules on a cecropia moth caterpillar, or the delicate scales on a monarch's wing; captions indicate not only the subject matter but, blessedly, the degree of enlargement involved, settling the scale question in a way that other books would do well to emulate. Kids will be drawn to this like Bishop's subject to flame. The book concludes with a two-page account of Bishop's pursuit of photographs for the book, an index, and a glossary.