National Audubon Society Field Guide to Insects and Spiders

Rating:
Summary: Great color photographs but underinclusive
Review: The color photographs are vivid and in focus. The descriptive text is interesting and useful. However, this book ought to have been called our 25 favorite spiders and 75 favorite insects. I haven't been able to find a single local spider in the book (and we have many to choose from). It's really less of a field guide and more of a coffee table book.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty pictures
Review: This book has a decent array of insects, however its spiders section is definately lacking. I enjoy identifying the spiders and insects I see everywhere I go and I don't even bother to bring this book with me since I can never find a match. The pictures are very nice though, I wish more field guides had pictures instead of drawings.

Rating:
Summary: Not enough information on Spiders
Review: This book is lacking in the identification of spiders. I have five very abundant spiders in my yard and in my house and yet I have only come across one of the them in this book. I have recently found out through the internet, not this book, that one rather large common spider I have been finding in my house is a hobo spider, which bite is equal to that of a brown recluse spider. Extremely disappointed that a spider with such a bite could not easily be found in this book. Would like to find a good field guide on just spiders, however, have not found any to date.

Rating:
Summary: Nice pictures, but not enough knowledge or species covered
Review: This is a good book and the pictures are beautiful, but most insects that I find aren't in this book. They only cover 700 species in the U.S. and Canada, which is too few. If you're just curious or just starting to study insects this is a good book for you, but if you're more science-oriented or advanced in your entymology, then the Peterson's guide may be a better choice.

Rating:
Summary: AUDUBON GUIDE TO INSECTS AND SPIDERS
Review: This is a great book for anyone interested in Insects and is especially good for school projects. It has about 800 full-color photos and descriptions of many Norht American Insects ans Spiders. Compared to the steep price at bookstores of $19.00, the $13.00 price is a steal. A must have for all insect lovers

Rating:
Summary: A Source of Endless Fascination
Review: We laypersons tend to group insects into two categories: attractive and repellent. Everyone loves butterflies; bees are admired for their industry and usefulness; but wasps have had a bad press from Aristophanes to the present: adjectives like "waspish" or "waspy", or even acronyms like WASP all have negative connotations. So it was with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity that I recently observed in my garden a wasp-like creature of unusual size, shape and coloring. I consulted the field guides available to me, but the Audubon Guide was the only one that allowed me to identify this insect as a pigeon horntail.

Mere identification, however, was not enough. I was intrigued to learn that the female uses her ovipositor to bore into wood, deposit one egg in each hole, then cover the eggs with fungal spores kept in a special pocket in her abdomen. As the embryos prepare to hatch, fungi begin to grow and soften the wood, allowing the larvae to tunnel into side branches where they feed for up to two years before pupating.
But - in a marvelous system of checks and balances - the Giant Ichneumon is approaching, pressing her long antennae against the tree bark to detect vibrations made by horntail larvae, and laying her eggs into the tunnels. The ichneumon larvae feed on the horntail host, causing its death - but not before the ichneumon larva is fully grown.

At this point I was hooked. I read up on other wasp-like creatures I encountered in and around my garden: cicada killers, digger wasps, mud daubers, etc. In each case the photographs were excellent, and the descriptions of habitat, food, life cycle,etc. were fascinating. I can see how this can become an engrossing hobby .... and I haven't even started yet on dragonflies, grasshoppers, and waterbugs! In any event, I have gained a new respect for these creatures, and I will think twice before I swat a wasp or squash a beetle.