Thank god for birthdays!

The pretty much only thing that's good about getting old is not really wanting anything for Christmas and birthdays anymore. Obviously I'm lucky enough to have pretty much everything else I need in life: a job, a roof over my head and food on the table. And I'm not one for just buying stuff apart from one thing.

Books. Absolutely love everything about them. Cook books, biography, fiction. The lot. I can't get enough. And let's be honest, once the lights go out and the endarkenment happens having hard copies for everything will be incredibly useful.

At least that's what I tell myself.

Anyway, I recently had a birthday. Not a big one. And all I asked for was books. Ask and you shall receive. Well something like that!

Come the big day I happily unwrapped a quartet of new beetle books, and boy was I a happy lad.

The two French books are supplements by Coulon to the original Carabid book by Jeannel. The original can be found in two parts here. My French is passable but there are still lots of technical words to look up and learn. There's so much info here and most (if not all) the UK fauna is covered, plus some that may make an appearance one day. The supplements are particularly useful for groups such as Bembidion and there are lots of good drawings of the naughty bits to aid ID.

 

The other I got given are the two water beetle atlases. But they are so much more than just maps.
There's stuff on ID and taxonomy, life-cycle alongside sections on habitat and distributions. And then there are the maps. Every species gets one and the records are broken into pre and post 1980 plus also sub-fossil.

 

Just an amazing labour of love by Garth Foster et al. 

There's plenty here to keep me occupied through the cold, dark winter nights whilst dreaming of warmer days looking for beetles...