Puckster wrote on Dec 18^th, 2012 at 3:46am:

Can you recommend a butterfly id field guide small and light enough to take on QP trips?

Good question - maybe this is worth a separate topic.

I never take field guides when I'm canoe tripping, because they're so heavy (the good ones are full of glossy color plates) and you need one for butterflies, one for flowers, one for bugs, one for mushrooms, ...

And you really need a different one for each geographic area - the "all North America" ones usually have only enough room to list the most common species in any category.

But there are almost always times when I wish I had a good field guide with me. If there were a set of searchable guides in electronic form, I'd be tempted to take a couple of steps out of the Cretaceous and buy an e-reader.

I'm looking forward to hearing what other people do.