Butterflies of the Australian region by Bernard d' Abrera.

Of course these books are aimed at the whole of Indonesia, including the Indonesian part of New Guinea, West Papua. PNG locals won't be able to read them. Anything that helps instil a love of nature in the locals must be a good thing. Some of them may even stop cutting the forest down (fat chance - I know).

I should point out that Thai is actually a much more logical and straightforward language than my native English or other European languages, even simpler than Bahasa (Malay and Indonesian being the 2 variants of that base language). The only complication is there are 5 tones and it has its own alphabet, but that is totally phonetic so if you learn the letters you can read exactly how to pronounce each word, unlike English. Bahasa was never written until the colonial times so they have no alphabet of their own, similar to Vietnamese in that respect (although the languages are totally different). Thai has no gender agreement, no plurals, verbs don't change with tense or case and a purely logical sentence structure without lots of little words (a, an, the etc) that are common in English.

Adam.

Alain, send me a PM with your e-mail address and I might be able to help.

Tom

Bernard D'Abrera has informed me that the paper by Tennent in Apollo that I originally cited in this post contains untrue statements about him, and as a result has requested that I remove the citation until such time as the matter has been rectified by the journal/author. Since the paper does indeed contain a sentence that could be regarded as defamatory I have decided to comply with his request.

Adam.

Yes, there seems there are many errors in d'Abrera works, that confound those taxonomist especially with his types. However for the average collector these massive works are ideal for identification, although they may be well out of date in some sections, he, like every other taxonomist I know, seems to have his own ideas on what may be a species or subspecies or form. Soon as a work of this magnitude is published it will be out date, because the other taxonomists will have changed genus names or elevated new species because that's how they see it. Funny how everybody will always criticize his works, but they all own them. No, I am not a d'Abrera fan, his scathing attacks in the Birdwing book was painful to read and yes he will not often consult other specialists in the lepidoptera groups. Also his unbelievable ideas that a creator made everything and anything in his spare time, are truly amazing for a serious scentist. Certainly the best known eccentric man of butterflies and one that will be remembered by entomologists of the future when many others are long forgotten.

If he focused on quality rather than pretty his books would be of scientific value. But I doubt he'll get the picture even if he reads this.

A pity when he should be forgotten and many others remembered.

Read more: insectnet.proboards.com/thread/4625/butterflies-australian-region-bernard-abrera?page=2&scrollTo=42607#ixzz3CGZtlN7z


Hope you are reading this Bernard.

I have most of his books, certainly all of the Butterflies of the xxx Region(s) series, including all the volumes on the other families that I personally don't work on, as well as his works on Sphingidae and Saturniidae (but I do not have the latest one of that series).

I must agree with Peter, for all the errors, faults and quirks in his work, they are still the most generally useful butterfly books available (rather than specialist works), and in reality probably represent the only such work since Seitz. Despite errors of nomenclature they are a great general guide to butterflies of the World and invaluable for tentative identification.

I would also like to send best regards to Bernard if he is reading this. I still remember having many interesting tea breaks with him in the NHM back in 1980.

Adam.