Our enduring love affair with 'flying jewels'

Shaoni Bhattacharya, consultant

(Image: Ray Tang/Rex)

?My parents took me to a butterfly house when I was 6. That Christmas, I asked for a greenhouse.? By the age of 8, Luke Brown had bred his first butterfly, the zebra longwing, Heliconius charithonia. Now as manager of the Sensational Butterflies exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London, it is that child?s delight he hopes to inspire.

And he succeeds. Against the backdrop of the museum?s towers, a heated marquee attracts visitors to walk around an evocation of a butterfly?s life cycle, with up to 1500 tropical and semi-tropical butterflies and moths dancing around them. Especially exciting is a glass-fronted warm room, where nascent butterflies emerge from chrysalises and gingerly unfurl their wings.

The romance of butterflies is also captured in William Leach?s book Butterfly People: An American encounter with the beauty of the world. He reminds us of the duality of these ?flying jewels?, initially desired as objects of beauty, and later representing the spirituality of nature versus emergent capitalism.

Leach voyages from 18th to the early 20th century, telling the strange stories of America?s obsessive ?butterfly people?. We meet, for example, the owner of a coal mine turned eminent lepidopterist, and a Shakespearean actor who entertained gold miners panning the Wild West, while also netting his own lepidopteral gold.

Through these characters Leach captures a passion bordering on fanaticism. But their obsessional pursuit of butterflies resonates outside their field, their stories criss-crossing that of the early US scientific establishment, the journals Science and The American Naturalist, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Fascinating, too, is the background against which these early naturalists and their butterfly stories unfold, with the frontier spirit permeating their explorations. Butterfly hunting went hand in hand with the gold rush, and the steady advance of the railroads into uncharted wilds opened up new frontiers into nature.

That was not without a big price tag, however: in just 20 years the US achieved a level of environmental exploitation that had taken centuries in Europe.

Meanwhile in Europe the influence of the Romantic poets, with their appreciation of the natural world, and the spread of empires opened up new windows on nature.

In many ways, Butterfly People is a boys? adventure story in which gun-toting naturalists imperil their lives just to touch the wing of a rare species. Today?s butterfly people will be enthralled, though outsiders perhaps less so. But the wonder Leach evokes will captivate all who appreciate the natural world.

Sensational Butterflies is at London?s Natural History Museum until 15?September

Book information
Butterfly People: An American encounter with the beauty of the world by William R. Leach
Random House
$32.50

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