Patrick Barkham

> The great Victorian naturalist and collector Alfred Russel Wallace famously described how the excitement of discovering the world’s biggest butterfly, Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing, in the tropical forests of Malaysia caused him to retire with a headache for the rest of the day. In his 1869 book, The Malay Archipelago, he wrote: ‘My heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache for the rest of the day.’

> One species, the Large Blue, became officially extinct when I was a boy, but was deliberately reintroduced in a secret location known only as Site X

> The most magical sixtieth species would be the Camberwell Beauty. Like many butterfly lovers, since I was a boy I had longed to see one of these large, romantic butterflies with brown wings so rich they were almost purple, bordered by lemon yellow. My heart still lurches every time I spot a dark silhouette against the sky that is big enough to be a Beauty; so far, it has always turned out to be a common Red Admiral or Peacock.

> In favourable conditions in the UK, a Painted Lady can race through its life cycle in a flash: from egg to rapidly growing caterpillar, to chrysalis and then adult in barely eight weeks. Other butterflies, such as the Chequered Skipper, may spend a hundred days feeding up as a caterpillar and take a year to go through one turn of its life cycle. Most British butterfly species spend the winter in the form of a caterpillar, which is surprising because they seem at their most vulnerable when a soft, juicy worm

> a Swallowtail chrysalis can survive submerged in water, while the pupa of various Blues and Hairstreaks produce audible squeaks to attract ants. Butterflies need warmth and sunshine to hatch from the chrysalis; when they do, they cannot fly immediately but must pump haemolymph (a butterfly’s equivalent of blood) into their crinkled wings to inflate them, spreading them out until they are dry, firm and ready to take to the wing.

> Psyche is the Greek word for butterfly. It is also Greek for soul. The demi-goddess Psyche appeared as a butterfly and both ancient and modern societies have seen butterflies as our souls, elevated from the earthy constraints of living in a body and liberated from suffering. In seventeenth-century Ireland, an edict forbade the killing of white butterflies because they were seen as the souls of children

> Whenever it settled in the sun it, characteristically, refused to open its wings. Brimstones are one of several butterflies which never bask in the sunshine by spreading their wings wide open.

> the caterpillar at first fed on thyme. When it reached its final instar, or stage of growth, it was still tiny. Waiting until the end of the day, it threw itself from the thyme flower to the ground and secreted a seductive fluid to attract the attention of a red ant. Upon finding the caterpillar, the ant tapped it. There ensued a frenzied ‘milking’ of the creature as other ants clustered around it. Eventually the caterpillar reared up into an ‘S’ shape and, at this inscrutable command, the ant became agitated, grabbed the Large Blue in its jaw and took it to the safety of its nest. Having entered the nest, the caterpillar turned tyrant

> Even more exotic than a Continental species of Large Blue was a rare parasitic wasp which could enter the ants’ nest, disable opposition by spraying a chemical around the nest that turned the ants against each other and, while they were fighting, inject the Large Blue caterpillars with its eggs. So the ants would still be duped into feeding the caterpillar, thereby providing food for the wasp grub growing monstrously inside it

> In this ordinary-looking patch of recently coppiced woodland there were at least 1300 Heath Fritillaries flying. Half the entire British population of one of our rarest butterflies currently on the wing were in this quarter of a hectare.

> The Camberwell Beauty is not the only butterfly named after what became a London suburb: the Speckled Wood was originally called the Enfield Eye, such was its popularity in the woods that bowed to the frenetic development of north London. On Enfield Chase, Dru Drury, a wealthy entomologist, recorded ‘Black veind white Butterfly plentiful and fine’ in the 1760s; 150 years later, the Black-veined White would be extinct across the whole of the country

> Wings are not like solar panels, and blood does not circulate around them (you can cut the wing off a butterfly and it will not bleed to death). Butterflies keep warm by trapping air around their body, which is why when you look at them closely most butterfly bodies are almost obscenely hairy. When butterflies settle and open their wings on a flat surface, these trap warm air beneath them. This is what warms them up. White butterflies – the Large, Small and Green-veined White, for instance – are a bit different: they always sit with their wings in a stiff ‘v’ shape. They don’t hold their wings flat and outstretched. This is because they are reflective baskers. The sun hits their pale wings at an angle and is directed onto their bodies, which are dark and absorb the heat.

> I clocked up twenty-six species of butterfly that August day on the Downs – the most butterflies I had ever seen in a day

> There seem to be more narrative books about butterflies for the general reader in America, where the best I found was An Obsession with Butterflies by Sharman Apt Russell, who has written an excellent, accessible exploration of butterfly science with a global perspective. Miriam Rothchild’s Butterfly Cooing Like a Dove is a clever sideways look at butterflies in literature and art.… (mais)