The Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America
by Eric R. Eaton & Kenn Kaufman
New! Published February 28, 2007

I had been fascinated with the sheer diversity of the insect realm since the age of 13, and with this book project I was finally able to focus on insects in a serious way. Most people pay scant attention to insects (except perhaps as sources of annoyance), so they are unaware of the dazzling variety of insect life that can be found even in a suburban yard or small city park. Just in the U.S. and Canada there are close to 90,000 different species of insects, including nearly 11,000 kinds of moths and over 25,000 kinds of beetles, all with their own color patterns, forms, and habits.
This great diversity of insect life is wonderful, but it also poses a huge challenge for anyone who is trying to write a pocket-sized field guide! Some technical works for professional entomologists have treated insects at the level of higher classifications, looking at the diagnostic details that make it possible to identify insects to order or family. However, many of these details can be seen only under a microscope, so they are only useful to the person who is willing to prepare a scientific collection. My aim was to produce a book for anyone who was curious about nature, so I decided to focus on a kind of "naked-eye entomology," focusing on the insects that were large, conspicuous, or common enough to be noticed by the average person. Professional biologists will still use their technical works, but this field guide was intended for everyone else.
Painted Lichen Moth -- just one of the hundreds of beautiful moth species illustrated in this guide
In writing this book, I had the pleasure of working with Eric R. Eaton. Eric had just moved to Tucson, Arizona, where I was living at the time, and he was recommended to me by the great naturalist Robert Michael Pyle, so I knew he must be a talented individual. Indeed he was. Eric combined a professional's level of knowledge about insects with an amateur's level of enthusiasm, and he could write about insects (or anything else) with clarity and style and wit. Most entomologists specialize on particular insects, and an individual may become the world's authority on one family of flies, for example, or one genus of beetles. Eric was not the world authority on any one group, but he had a phenomenal level of knowledge about insects in general, and I learned a huge amount by working with him on this project.
Eric R. Eaton
photo by Karen Wright
All photos, drawings, and text on this web site are by Kenn Kaufman unless noted otherwise. Copyrighted, all rights reserved.