Find it, name it

DORLING Kindersley has re-launched its series of pocket nature guides in association with the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). There are six volumes in the series covering butterflies and moths, fungi, insects and spiders, trees, wild animals and wild flowers.

The RSPB is Britain’s equivalent of BirdWatch Ireland, so it’s a little odd that there’s no bird guide included in the set.

But the idea behind the series is excellent and Dorling Kindersley always produces attractive, well-made books. The guides are printed in a slim format that genuinely does fit into an average pocket and are well bound with water-resistant covers.

All the species are illustrated with photographs, which I have always found much better than the traditional painted illustrations for actually identifying things. There is extra information on habitat, key characteristics for identification and on distribution, in many cases with distribution maps. The text is completely non-technical, well-written and to the point.

The two guides to wild flowers and fungi are considerably thicker than the other four — there are far more species to cover — and they cost £9.99. The other four are £7.99.

This sounds almost too good to be true and, unfortunately, it is. From the point of view of an ordinary person wanting to identify wild things in the Irish countryside these guides have some fatal flaws.

All the guides cover Britain and Europe. We have a relatively small island fauna and flora in this country so most of the European species covered are not found here. This means that if you’re trying to identify something you’ve come across in the wild in Ireland you have to wade through masses of irrelevant entries describing things only found in the Balkans or Arctic Norway before you find what you’re looking for.

And when you do find it the entry has been so condensed to make space for the other stuff that the information is unsatisfactory. It would have been so much better if the publishers had restricted themselves to Britain and Ireland.

You might think the distribution maps would help to overcome this problem but this brings to light the second fatal flaw in these guides. Dorling Kindersley specialises in producing large format books, including many beautiful ‘coffee-table’ volumes. They don’t seem to have adjusted very well to the small format. The distribution maps are smaller than a postage stamp and many cover the whole of Europe. This leaves Ireland as a tiny speck which can contain no detail.

Much of the print is also very tiny and uses coloured inks on a coloured background. Much of it I couldn’t make out, even with my reading glasses on, and I soon found myself using a magnifying glass.

To give some examples of the shortcomings of the books, I looked up a few things in the guide to wild animals. The animals include reptiles and amphibians as well as mammals. Nearly 90 species of reptile are described, of which only one occurs in Ireland, and 53 amphibian species, of which only three occur in Ireland.

The tiny distribution map for the natterjack toad indicates that it does not exist in Britain or Ireland (even when I used the hand lens), but in fact it’s found in small numbers in both countries. In the mammal section I looked up the bank vole and the map also indicates that it doesn’t exist in Ireland, although it’s now found in nearly half of our land area.

So I changed over to the guide to wild flowers. I looked up the bloody cranesbill, that relative of the geranium that makes the Burren such a glorious place in summer. I had a little difficulty finding it because in the index of most field guides you’d go to the letter ‘C’ and find cranesbill, bloody, along with all the other cranesbills. In this one you go to ‘B’ to find it. I didn’t mind this, once I’d figured it out. What I did mind was that the distribution map showed it growing in England and Wales but not in Ireland. There was a similar problem with the distribution map for the spring gentian.

Despite all these negative points I’m delighted I have copies of all of the guides. I think I’ll be using them a lot when I travel in Europe, particularly if I’m travelling by Ryanair, because they’re light, portable and quite comprehensive. In the past if I spotted a lizard in Spain or a fungus growing in a Polish forest I’d have to photograph it or try and remember it until I got home in order to figure out what it was. These guides should solve that problem for me.

Wild Flowers by Neil Fletcher. £9.99.

Fungi by Shelley Evans and Geoffrey Kirby. £9.99.

Wild Animals by Chris Gibson. £7.99.

Insects and Spiders by George C McGavin. £7.99.

Butterflies and Moths by Paul Sterry and Andrew MacKay. £7.99.

Trees by Allen Coombes. £7.99.