Anatomy and recognition cues

This short course will, I hope, demystify a lot of the jargon you’ll see in butterfly and moth field guides and textbooks. Some jargon is justified because knowing what the various body parts are called, and the vocabulary used to describe markings and patterns, helps us to communicate with each other about lepidoptera. It’s a bit like the birders with their ‘primaries’, ‘secondaries’, ‘ceres’, ‘tail coverts’ etc. Knowing what these are, and how they combine to create a visual picture of a bird, helps them to describe verbally what they are seeing. They can talk ‘bird’. Well, this course will get you started talking ‘butterfly’!