Where is 'Butterflies of Canada'

Butterfly Identification
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May be stupid but I can no longer find the Butterflies of Canada resource as linked to from Rick Cavasin’s pages. Agriculture Canada seems to have removed this entirely, and replaced it with CBIF which I’m sure is useful for scientists but not for ordinary folks who want to id a species. There has been no update to CBIF website since 2020 as far as I can see.

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That is a very good question @GilesR I almost never used that resource, so it went under my radar that it disappeared. We will do our best to post alternative resources here, though.

@mlarrivee or @kmcfarland do you know how to access that resource?

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Let me look into it. @neoarctia aka Chris Schmidt might know something about it

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As a co-author of Butterflies of Canada, I was more than a little surprised to discover it had been removed by Agriculture Canada from its website where it had appeared for 20 plus years. I am afraid it is now only available as a book (still on Amazon). Peter Hall

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Hey, @Peter_Hall, thanks for the info and I am glad to see you here at the forum.

Indeed, it is a shame that such resource is not available anymore. Do you have any tips/recommendations for alternative sources of information?

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Buying the book would at least give the authors some royalty but i would hope that some protest is lodged with agriculture canada. Much is lost when observations and anecdotes about species are sacificed for ‘data’.

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We actually have all the species descriptions in french and english in a spreadsheet. It would not be too hard to make them available on eButterfly. @e.butterfly.help perhaps we can discuss this and find a potential solution?

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Taking notes for our next meeting @mlarrivee !

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Thanks for this. Should ebutterfly choose to post Butterflies of Canada as adapted from the spreadsheet that would be great although i suspect quite a laborious job. It would interesting if this could be a living document, updated fron time to time with observations from ebutterfliers. A related suggestion might be to have a regional tag (eg North-east) so regional observations could be easily grouped.