Everyone loves butterflies. Of course we do. Possibly more than any other living thing, they represent to us the terrible fragility of life, the knowledge that however colourful and attractive we may all be, something or someone really unpleasant is waiting around the next corner to smash our face in. This may be why butterfly collectors, men who love butterflies but nonetheless seem compelled to poison them, attach them to bits of cork board and stuff them in a drawer, have become a byword for weirdness and perversity. Who would kill the one you love? As countless TV thrillers have shown, only a complete loon.
Fortunately, mainstream entomology has moved on since Victorian times, and indeed since John Fowles wrote The Collector. Butterfly obsessives, or ‘Aurelians’ as they rather charmingly call themselves, now seek only to find butterflies and photograph them, while scientists are more concerned with their conservation than their dissection.
There are 59 native butterflies in the UK: some are robust and common, others are vulnerable and rare, and a few are hanging on for dear life. Patrick Barkham, who writes for the Guardian, used to go butterfly-watching with his father as a child. In his twenties he was distracted, as so many of us are, by metropolitan fleshpots and the greasy pole of career, but in his early thirties he finds himself drawn back to countryside and childish pursuits. He sets himself a challenge: to spot all 59 varieties of British butterfly within a calendar year.
As Barkham acknowledges, this is just the sort of challenge people set themselves when they want to write a book about it:
Searching for butterflies should be as spontaneous and instinctive as these insects in flight. Nabokov loved to ‘drop in’, as it were, on a familiar butterfly in his particular habitat, in order to see if he had emerged, and if so, how he was doing.
The quest becomes all-engrossing. Barkham starts to dream of butterflies:
Swarms of them, night after night, as if the environmental catastrophe of the 20th century had never happened and a gently tilled countryside was again enlivened by millions of insects.
In his mother’s garden in Norfolk, he sees his first of the year, a Small Tortoiseshell. ‘Being so pleased by something so simple felt like becoming a child again.’ He meets some marvellous butterfly obsessives. ‘Forty years ago this year,’ says one, ‘I saw my first Purple Emperor. There was no going back after that.’ He travels to northern Scotland in search of the Chequered Skipper, to Northern Ireland to see Réal’s Wood White, which can only be distinguished from the normal Wood White by the size of its penis, and to the Cotswolds hoping to see a Duke of Burgundy, one of the rarest and most vulnerable species of all. We don’t know why the Duke of Burgundy is called that, but we do know that he was previously known as Mr Vernon’s Small Fritillary. Male Dukes live just five days on average:
Females appear rarely and will spend three-quarters of their day hidden in vegetation, wings snapped shut. Oates once watched a female for three and a half hours. It did nothing.
And that, in its way, is the essence of this delightful book. Barkham, who in his author photograph looks a bit like an endangered species himself, writes with authority, love, charm, understatement and the dryest of wit. There are wonderful descriptive passages, moments of absurdity and frequent small epiphanies of wonder and awe, as he luxuriates in the glorious variety of butterfly life. In late March he sees two Small Tortoiseshells
embroiled in the theatre of mating … For a hibernating butterfly, winter must be like a war. This was like a scene after a long conflict and an interminable separation: a man and a woman, exhausted and past their best, getting together for the first time.
For something that’s only taking place on a leaf, that’s not bad at all.
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