1. George Monbiot, ‘Back to Nature’. Commissioned online essay by the BBC at www.bbc.com/earth/bespoke/story.
2. Robert Browning (1845), ‘The Lost Leader’. The poem was famously used against Harold Macmillan by one of his former Cabinet colleagues Nigel Birch during the Profumo scandal in 1963.
1. Also the author of my favourite guide to collecting and rearing, R. L. E. Ford (1963), Practical Entomology. Wayside and Woodland series, Warne, London.
2. Matthew Oates (2005), ‘Extreme butterfly-collecting: A biography of I. R. P. Heslop’. British Wildlife, 16(3), 164–71.
3. Beth Fowkes Tobin (2014), The Duchess’s Shells: Natural history collecting in the age of Cook’s voyages. Yale University Press, p. 267.
4. Reported at www.insectnet.com Forum.
5. The RCK collection was formed in 1947 and is supported by the Cockayne Trust, a charity promoting the use of the collection as a scientific resource. Details at the museum website, www.nhm.ac.uk.
1. Facsimile edition of Thomas Moffat (1967), The Theatre of Insects or Lesser living Creatures. Da Capo Press, New York, p. 970. A short account of the discovery of the flattened tortoiseshell butterfly is on p. 103 of George Thomson’s edition of the butterfly sections, suggesting that, assuming it to be contemporary with the manuscript, ‘it is by far the oldest extant specimen of Lepidoptera’. Thomson, George C. (2012), Insectorum sive Minorum Animalium Theatrum. The Butterflies and Moths. Second edition. Self-published, Waterbeck, Scotland. p. 103. The MS is in the care of the British Library, Sloane 4014.
2. Petiver’s directions for collectors are reproduced in Michael A. Salmon (2001), The Aurelian Legacy. Harley Books, Colchester, p. 57. The same source has a leaf from Buddle’s butterflies on p. 59 and the original Brown Hairstreak caught or bred by Petiver on p. 58.
3. Mike Fitton and Pamela Gilbert, ‘Insect Collections’, in Arthur MacGregor (ed. 1994), Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum. British Museum Press, pp. 112–22. Specimen collecting of any kind seems to have begun around 1700; there is, for example, no surviving taxidermy before that date.
4. C. H. Smith (1842), ‘Memoir of Dru Drury’, cited in Salmon, op. cit., p. 214.
5. ‘Everything is kept in true English fashion in prodigious confusion in one wretched cabinet and in boxes …’ From a German visitor, Zacharias von Uffenbach, to Petiver’s lodgings in 1710, quoted in David Allen (1976), The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History. Allen Lane, London, p. 38.
6. Fitton and Gilbert, op. cit., pp. 112–22.
7. Fitton and Gilbert, op. cit., p. 112.
8. Details of Ray’s butterflies and their captors in C. E. Raven (2nd edn, 1950), John Ray: Naturalist. Cambridge University Press, pp. 407–18.
9. Vladimir Nabokov’s short story, ‘The Aurelian’, first appeared in Atlantic magazine, November 1941; available online at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive.
10. Henry Baker 1698–1774, see Thomas Finlayson Henderson essay in Dictionary of National Biography, online at en.wikisource.org/wiki/Baker,_Henry.
11. See Victoria and Albert Museum website, www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/j/about-james-leman/ .
12. Biography by Blanche Henrey (1986), No Ordinary Gardener: Thomas Knowlton 1691–1781. Natural History Museum, London.
13. Harris’s account of the Cornhill fire is in Salmon, op. cit., p. 33.
14. Short biographies of Henry Leeds and other collectors in Salmon, op. cit.
15. E. B. Ford (1945), Butterflies. Collins New Naturalist, No. 1, p. 270.
1. Michael A. Salmon (2001), The Aurelian Legacy. Harley Books, Colchester, pp. 68–9. A fine-art facsimile of the Romance of Alexander was published in 2014 by Quaternio Verlag, Lucerne.
2. Quoted in Christina Hardiment (2005), Malory: The Life and Times of King Arthur’s Chronicler. HarperCollins, London, p. 67.
3. Letter from H. Ramsey Cox to the Entomologist, 11 April 1875, and replies. Quoted in Michael A. Salmon and Peter J. Edwards (2005), The Aurelian’s Fireside Companion. Paphia Publishing, Lymington, pp. 31–4.
4. For example, www.britishbutterflies.co.uk/collecting.asp.
5. Introduction by John Fowles in Kate Salway (1996), Collector’s Items, Wilderness Editions, pp. 8–9.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle (2000), Nabokov’s Butterflies. Allen Lane, Penguin Press, London. Some of my notes on Nabokov and Lolita come from a Radio 3 programme on the great man broadcast on 25 April 1999. See also Kurt Johnson (2001), Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius. McGraw-Hill, New York.
9. Tony Juniper (2013), What Has Nature Ever Done for Us? Why money really does grow on trees. Profile Books.
10. John Fowles, ‘Lessons of Lepidoptery’, The Spectator, 21 April 2001, p. 40.
11. For the association with serial killers see Wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collector.
12. On collecting abroad, see www.theskepticalmoth.com/collecting-permits, updated August 2014. For light relief, see Torben B. Larsen (2004), Hazards of Butterfly Collecting. Cravitz Publishing Co, Brentwood, Essex.
1. A facsimile edition of The Aurelian edited by Robert Mays was published in 1986 by Littlehampton Book Service.
2. W. S. Bristowe (1967), ‘The Life of a Distinguished Woman Naturalist, Eleanor Glanville (circa 1654–1709)’, Entomologists’ Gazette, 18, 202–11; Bristowe (1975), ‘More about Eleanor Glanville’, Ent. Gazette, 26, 107–17.
3. Letter quoted in R. S. Wilkinson (1966), ‘Elizabeth Glanville, an Early English Entomologist’, Entomologists’ Gazette, 17, 149–60.
4. Letter quoted in ibid.
5. Reproduced in Michael A. Salmon (2001), The Aurelian Legacy. Harley Books, Colchester, p. 341.
6. Wilkinson, op. cit.
7. Ibid. For details on the Petiver collection see Mike Fitton and Pamela Gilbert, ‘Insect Collections’, in Arthur MacGregor (ed. 1994), Sir Hans Sloane, Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, British Museum, London, pp. 112–22.
8. Wilkinson, op. cit.
9. For Charlton’s hoax butterfly, see Salmon, op. cit., p. 66 (with illustration).
10. Richard Bradley, ‘Review of Entomology’ (1812) Transactions of the Entomological Society of London, Volume 1, 1812. For a biography of the Duchess, see Molly McClain (2001), Beaufort: The Duke and his Duchess 1657–1715. Yale University Press, London and New Haven.
11. Beth Fowkes Tobin (2014), The Duchess’s Shells: Natural history collecting in the age of Cook’s voyages. Yale University Press, London and New Haven.
12. Details of the auction are in Chapter 12, ‘The Dispersal of the Collection’ of Tobin, op.cit.
13. G. A. Cook (2007), ‘Botanical Exchanges: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Duchess of Portland’, in History of European Ideas, Pergamon Press, pp. 142–56.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. From a large literature on women and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, e.g. Ann B. Shteir (1996), Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s daughters and botany in England 1760–1860. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
17. Sam George (2010), ‘Animated Beings: Enlightenment Entomology for Girls’. Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 33 (4), 487–505.
18. Ibid.
19. For Laetitia Jermyn, see Salmon, op. cit., pp. 136–7. On Maria Catlow, see David Elliston Allen (2010), Books and Naturalists. Collins New Naturalist, London, 112, p. 214.
20. For Emma Hutchinson, see Salmon, op. cit., pp. 160–1.
21. Lucy Evelyn Cheesman in Joyce Duncan (2002), Ahead of Their Time: A biographical dictionary of risk-taking women. Greenwood Press, Westport.
22. Jane Hayter-Hames (1991), Madam Dragonfly: The life and times of Cynthia Longfield. Pentland Press, Edinburgh.
23. W. F. Cater (1980), Love Among the Butterflies: The travels of a Victorian Lady. Collins, London. Natascha Scott-Stokes (2006), Wild and Fearless: The life of Margaret Fountaine. Peter Owen, London.
1. Charles Abbot, see short biography in Michael A. Salmon (2001), The Aurelian Legacy. Harley Books, Colchester, p. 124. There is also an Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Enid Slatter (2004).
2. Portrait and short essay on Charles Rothschild and his nature conservation work in Tim Sands (2010), Wildlife in Trust: A hundred years of nature conservation. Wildlife Trusts, Newark, pp. 1–12.
3. www.ohllimited.co.uk/ashtonweb.
4. Charlotte Lane, personal communication.
5. Naomi Gryn (2004), ‘Dame Miriam Rothschild’. Jewish Quarterly, 51, 53–8.
6. Ibid.
7. Miriam Rothschild explained her stance on homosexuality to Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs on 23 April 1989. Another of her reasons was the victims’ vulnerability to blackmail. The forty-minute interview can be heard online at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009mdy7.
8. Miriam Rothschild, personal communication.
9. Miriam Rothschild and Peter Marren (1997), Rothschild’s Reserves: Time and fragile nature. Harley Books, Colchester, and Balaban Publishers, Rehovot. Details of ‘Rothschild’s Reserves’ are now available online at: www.wildlifetrusts.org/rothschildreserves.
10. Miriam Rothschild (1983), Dear Lord Rothschild: Birds, butterflies and history. Balaban Publishers and ISI Press, Philadelphia.
11. Sands, op. cit.
12. Miriam Rothschild (1991), Butterfly Cooing Like a Dove. Doubleday, London, p. 67.
13. The quotation is from Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, quoted in Rothschild, Butterfly Cooing, p. 57.
14. Rothschild, Butterfly Cooing, p. 67.
15. Miriam Rothschild’s most accessible account of the chemical defences of butterflies and moths is ‘British Aposematic Lepidoptera’, introductory chapter in John Heath and A. Maitland Emmet (eds 1985), The Moths and Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 2, Cossidae–Heliodinidae. Harley Books, Colchester, pp. 9–62.
16. Details in Helmut F. van Emden and John Gurdon (2006), ‘Dame Miriam Louisa Rothschild 1908–2005’. Biographical Memoir, Fellows of the Royal Society, 52.
17. Hannah Rothschild (2009), The Butterfly Effect. hannahrothschild.com/images/butterflies.pdf.
18. Rothschild, Dear Lord Rothschild, op. cit.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. See Rothschild, Dear Lord Rothschild, op. cit., pp. 177–180.
22. Cayley-Webster (1898), Through New Guinea and the Cannibal Countries. Fisher Unwin, London. One to take with a pinch of malarial salt.
23. Albert Meek (1913), A Naturalist in Cannibal Land. Fisher Unwin, London. Rothschild said of him that ‘Meek is a man who faces a danger bravely and then forgets all about it.’
24. The modest Karl Jordan has received a belated, deserved and excellent biography: Kristin Johnson (2012), Ordering Life: Karl Jordan and the Naturalist Tradition. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
25. Rothschild, Dear Lord Rothschild, op. cit., p. 152.
1. www.insects.org. The most detailed discussion of the word ‘butterfly’ I have come across is a comment piece by Anatoly Liberman (2007) on ‘Wilhelm Oehl and the Butterfly’, blog.oup.com/2007/08/butterfly.
2. The escape of a white moth from the mouth of a sleeping witch is an old tradition common to both Europe and North America (where certain large moths are known as ‘witches’). It is alluded to in poetry such as ‘The White Moth’ by Arthur Quiller-Couch (1895).
3. A full account of dragonfly folklore across the world is Jill Lucas (2002), Spinning Jenny and Devil’s Darning Needle. Privately published, Huddersfield. Also a summary from a British context in Peter Marren and Richard Mabey (2010), Bugs Britannica. Chatto & Windus, London, pp. 131–9.
4. Geoffrey Grigson (1955), The Englishman’s Flora, Dent & Sons, London, pp. 402–4.
5. Chapter XIV, ‘Of Butterflies’, in facsimile of the 1658 edition of Thomas Moffet, The Theatre of Insects or Lesser living Creatures. Da Capo Press, New York, pp. 957–75.
6. ‘Of the Use of butterflies’, in Thomas Moffet, op. cit., pp. 974–5.
7. A complete translation of the British butterfly section is in C. E. Raven (1950), John Ray: Naturalist. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 407–15.
8. A good summary is A. M. Emmet, ‘The Vernacular Names and Early History of British Butterflies’, the introductory chapter in Emmet and Heath (1989), The Moths and Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 7, (1), The Butterflies. Harley Books, Colchester, pp. 7–21.
9. Michael A. Salmon (2001), The Aurelian Legacy. Harley Books, Colchester, pp. 110–12.
10. Peter Marren (1998), ‘The English Names of Moths’. British Wildlife, 10(1), 29–38; Marren (2004), ‘The English Names of Butterflies’. British Wildlife, 15(6), 401–8.
11. Richard South (1906), The Butterflies of the British Isles. Warne Wayside and Woodland Series, London.
12. A. Maitland Emmet (1991), The Scientific Names of the British Lepidoptera: Their history and meaning. Harley Books, Colchester. Emmet was the authority on the meaning of names of butterflies and moths; this book, on their Latin names, is a scholarly masterpiece.
13. From Jeremy Thomas and Richard Lewington (2010), The Butterflies of Britain and Ireland. British Wildlife Publishing, Oxford, p. 30.
14. Ibid., p. 36.
1. Emmet in Emmet and Heath (1989), Moths and Butterflies, Volume 7(1), pp. 192–93. Emmet, A. Maitland (1989), ‘The Vernacular Names and early History of British Butterflies’, in ibid. Volume 7 (1), The Butterflies, pp. 7–21. Among modern authors who got the facts in reverse were E. B. Ford (1945) in his famous New Naturalist volume, Butterflies, and T. G. Howarth (1973) in the standard text of the day, South’s British Butterflies.
2. Emmet, op. cit., p. 192.
3. The full text of Cadenus and Vanessa is available on www.luminarium.org.
4. For the Luttrell Psalter see the British Library’s website bl.uk/onlinegallery/sacredtexts/luttrellpsalter.html and Michelle Brown (2006), The World of the Luttrell Psalter. British Library, London.
5. ‘Butterfly’ in Lucia Impelluso (2003), Nature and Its Symbols. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, pp. 330–2.
6. Irving F. Finkelstein (1985), ‘Death, Damnation and Resurrection: Butterflies as symbols in Western art’. Bulletin, Amateur Entomologists’ Society, 44, 123–32.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle (2000), Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and uncollected writings. Allen Lane, London, p. 676.
10. Vladimir Nabokov (1962), Pale Fire. Modern Classics edition, Penguin. The concluding lines of Canto 4 read:
A dark Vanessa with a crimson band / Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand / And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white. / And through the flowing shade and ebbing light / A man, unheedful of the butterfly – / Some neighbour’s gardener I guess – goes by / Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.
The author’s commentary continues:
One minute before his death, as we were crossing from his desmesne to mine and had begun working up between the junipers and ornamental shrubs, a Red Admirable came dizzily whirling around us like a coloured flame. Once or twice before we had already noticed the same individual, at that same time, on that same spot, where the low sun finding an aperture in the foliage splashed the brown sand with a last radiance while the evening’s shade covered the rest of the path. One’s eyes could not follow the rapid butterfly in the sunbeams as it flashed and vanished, and flashed again, with an almost frightening imitation of conscious play which now culminated in its settling upon my delighted friend’s sleeve. It took off, and we saw it next moment sporting in an ecstasy of frivolous haste around a laurel shrub, every now and then perching on a lacquered leaf and sliding down its grooved middle like a boy down the banisters on his birthday. Then the tide of the shade reached the laurels and the magnificent, velvet-and-flame creature dissolved with it.
11. The Red Admiral was one of Miriam Rothschild’s ‘enigmatical’ butterflies, one apparently non-toxic but possibly containing some chemical deterrent derived from the nettle. Miriam Rothschild (1985) in Heath and Emmet, Moths and Butterflies, Volume 2, op cit.
12. Henry Walter Bates (1864), The Naturalist on the River Amazons. John Murray, London.
13. Philip Howse (2010), Butterflies: Messages from Psyche. Papadakis, Winterbourne, Berks, p. 170. ‘I tried to create a tabula rasa in my mind and see the designs on the wings without preconceptions.’
14. Ibid., p. 96 and personal communication. Amplified further in Howse (2013), ‘Lepidopteran Wing Patterns and the Evolution of Satyric Mimicry’. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 109, 203–14, and a forthcoming paper about the Red Admiral.
1. Moffet’s butterfly cure and essay on the use of butterflies is in his Theatre of Insects or Lesser Living Creatures, pp. 974–5, facsimile edition (1967). Da Capo Press, New York.
2. Ibid.
3. Quoted in Charles E. Raven (2nd ed. 1950), John Ray Naturalist: His life and works. Cambridge University Press, p. 407.
4. See, for example, bees.pan-uk.org/other-pollinator-species. Generally butterfly tongues are too smooth for pollen to stick to. As usual there are exceptions, such as the Monarch which unwittingly carries the sticky pollen of milkweed on its tongue or legs. Certain moths can be efficient pollinators such as burnets and the Hummingbird hawkmoth. Not all bees are good pollinators either.
5. Philip Howse (2010), Butterflies: Messages from Psyche. Papadakis, Winterbourne, Berks. pp. 12–13.
6. Malcolm Davies and Jeyaraney Kathirithamby (1986), Greek Insects. Duckworth, London, pp. 99–109.
7. For example, ‘Butterfly’ in Lucia Impelluso (2004), Nature and its Symbols. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, pp. 330–3.
8. Davies and Kathirithamby, op. cit., with an image on p. 105.
9. One of the treasures of the British Museum. See Richard Parkinson (2008), The Painted Tomb-Chapel of Nebamun. British Museum or the Museum’s online website www.britishmuseum.org/explore/galleries/ancient_egypt/room_61_tomb-chapel_nebamun.aspx.
10. Howse, op. cit., pp. 44–5.
11. One of the treasures of the British Library. See Janet Backhouse (1983), Hastings Hours: A fifteenth century Book of Hours made for William, Lord Hastings, now in the British Library. Thames & Hudson, London.
12. William Gibson (1973), Hieronymus Bosch. Thames & Hudson, London.
13. A. Maitland Emmet (1991), The Scientific Names of the British Lepidoptera: Their history and meaning. Harley Books, Colchester, p. 157.
14. Irving L. Finkelstein (1985), ‘Death, Damnation and Resurrection: Butterflies as symbols in western art.’ Bulletin, Amateur Entomologists’ Society, 44, 123–32.
15. Ibid.
16. Aristotle’s treatise on the soul is available online at classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.html.
17. Moffet on moths: facsimile edition of The Theatre of Insects, op. cit., p. 975.
18. White butterflies flew in vast numbers over the churned landscape of the Western Front thanks to the cresses – their larval food plant – that proliferated on the open ground. Just as poppies represented sacrifice so white butterflies have come to represent peace. ‘Trench butterflies’, on the other hand, were bits of white toilet paper fluttering in the wind.
19. Virginia Woolf (1942), The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Hogarth Press, London.
20. W. H. Hudson, Green Mansions, quoted in Miriam Rothschild (1991), Butterfly Cooing like a Dove. Doubleday, London, p. 46.
21. Paul Waring (2001), A Guide to Moth Traps and Their Use. Amateur Entomologists’ Society, London.
22. Don Marquis, ‘Archy and Mehitabel’, quoted in Rothschild (1991), op. cit., p. 49.
23. ‘Candles’, in Rothschild (1991), op. cit., p. 46.
24. There is an outline of this pair of paintings on the website of the National Gallery of Scotland, www.nationalgalleries.org/collection.
25. Rothschild (1991), op. cit, p. 131.
26. In Philip Larkin (1988), Collected Poems. Faber & Faber, London.
27. www.sensationalquotes.com/Mark-Twain.html. Apparently it was written down in one of his notebooks.
1. From a detailed Wikipedia article on Georg or Joris Hoefnagel.
2. Chapter on Merian by Susan Owens in David Attenborough and others (2007), Amazing Rare Things: The art of natural history in the age of discovery. Royal Collection Publications, London, pp. 138–75.
3. Ernest Radford, Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com. Information on his Hanoverian origins at Christies website, www.christies.com/lotfinder/lotdetails.
4. Michael A. Salmon (2001), The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and their Collectors. Harley Books, Colchester, pp. 110–12.
5. Facsimile edition of The Aurelian, edited by Robert Mays (1986). Newnes Country Life Books.
6. The full title of Harris’s booklet is ‘The Natural System of Colours Wherein is displayed the regular and beautiful Order and Arrangement, Arising from Three Primitives, Red, Blue and Yellow. The manner in which each Colour is found, and its Composition, the Dependence they have on each other, and by their Harmonious Connection are produced the teints, or Colours, of every Object in the Creation.’
7. Howard Leathlean (2004), ‘Henry Noel Humphreys’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
8. Salmon, op. cit., pp. 138–9.
9. F. W. Frohawk (1934), The Complete Book of British Butterflies. Ward Lock, London. It was based on the same author’s massive two-volume work, The Natural History of British Butterflies, published by Hutchinson in 1924.
10. From Norman Riley’s obituary of Frohawk in the Entomologist, (1947) 80, 25–7.
11. June Chatfield (1987), F. W. Frohawk: His life and work. Crowood Press, Ramsbury, p. 39.
12. From author’s interview with Richard Lewington at his home in Oxfordshire, October 2013. For Lewington’s own views on the advantages of art over photography, see Lewington (2011), ‘Artwork versus Photography, Set Specimens versus Natural Posture’. Atropos, 43, 3–11.
13. Julian Spalding, obituary of David Measures in the Guardian, 12 November 2011.
14. Robert Gooden (ed., revised edn, 1981), Beningfield’s Butterflies. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. Obituary of Beningfield by Dennis Furnell, Independent, 29 May 1998.
15. Richard Tratt (2005), Butterfly Landscapes: A celebration of British butterflies painted in natural habitat. Langford Press, Peterborough.
1. Mark Cocker (2013), Birds and People. Jonathan Cape, London, pp. 27–8.
2. Large Blue diary: ntlargeblue.wordpress.com.
3. Jeremy Thomas (2004), ‘Comparative losses of British butterflies, birds and plants and the global extinction crisis’. Science, 1879–81.
4. Michael A. Salmon (2001), The Aurelian Legacy. Harley Books, Colchester, pp. 278–85. Large Coppers have come down in the world. The current price of a dozen Large Copper caterpillars from the Netherlands is about £12.50.
5. Information from www.InsectNet.com Forum.
7. Josiah Clark (2009), ‘A Helping Hand for the Hairstreak’. BayNature, baynature.org/articles.
8. www.iucnredlist.org/details/701/0.
9. Quoted in H. Mendel and S. H. Piotrowski (1986), Butterflies of Suffolk: An atlas and history. Suffolk Naturalists’ Society, Ipswich.
10. Jeremy Thomas and Richard Lewington (2010), The Butterflies of Britain and Ireland. British Wildlife Publishing, Gillingham, pp. 145–7.
11. Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Father’s Butlerflies’, in Bryan Boyd and Robert M. Pyle (eds 2001), Nabokov’s Butterflies. Penguin.
12. L. Hugh Newman (1967), Living with Butterflies. John Baker, London, pp. 198–202.
1. For the Big Butterfly Count website visit www.bigbutterflycount.org and follow the links for details.
2. In addition to the Millennium Atlas published in 2001, Butterfly Conservation has produced State of the UK’s Butterflies reports in 2005 and 2011 with the next one due around 2016. They are downloadable at butterfly-conservation.org/1643/the-state-of-britains-butterflies.html.
3. Richard Fox et al. (2006), The State of Britain’s Butterflies in Britain and Ireland, downloadable at the Butterfly Conservation website or in published form by Pisces Publications, Newbury.
4. J. A. Thomas (2004), ‘Comparative losses of British butterflies, birds and plants and the global extinction crisis’. Science, 303, 1879–81. An analysis of surveys dating back forty years indicated that 71 per cent of our butterfly species have declined over that period compared with 54 per cent of birds and 28 per cent of plants. ‘No dataset approaches this detail and scale anywhere in the world,’ commented Thomas.
5. ‘Coast-to-coast’. Butterfly, 114, Autumn 2013, p. 4.
6. Martin Warren’s ‘breakthrough’ history has not yet been written up but developed as a series of lectures to Butterfly Conservation branches. So it comes under the heading of ‘personal communication’.
7. J. Heath, E. Pollard and J. A. Thomas (1984), Atlas of Butterflies in Britain and Ireland. Viking, Harmondsworth.
8. For the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (UKBMS) visit www.ukbms.org and follow the links. The scheme is operated as a partnership between the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), Butterfly Conservation and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC).
9. Although Thomas’s PhD thesis is unpublished and the report he based on it confidential, a good summary of his findings can be found in the Black Hairstreak section of Jeremy Thomas and Richard Lewington (2010), The Butterflies of Britain and Ireland. British Wildlife Publishing, Gillingham.
10. There is a large and growing literature on the conservation of the Marsh Fritillary. Keith Porter wrote up his observations on the basking behaviour of its caterpillars in Oikos (1997). A more accessible account of this problematic butterfly can be found in Thomas and Lewington, op. cit., and an account of the ‘lessons’ learned in Nigel Bourne et al. (2013), in British Wildlife.
11. There is already a vast and growing literature on metapopulations. Hanski’s original paper on the Glanville Fritillary is Hanski, I (1994), A Practical model of metapopulation dynamics. J. Animal Ecology, 63, 151–62. See Also Hanski, I (2003) Biology of extinctions in butterfly metapopulations. In: Butterflies – ecology and evolution taking flight (ed. C.L. Bloggs, W. B. Watt & P. R. Ehrlich), pp. 577–602. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
12. See Brereton et al. (2012), in British Wildlife. In a wider context Butterfly Conservation has an Action Plan for the Pearl-bordered Fritillary at butterfly-conservation.org/files/pearl-bordered-fritillary-action-plan.doc.
13. Butterfly Conservation’s ten-point plan for saving our butterflies is in Fox et al. (2006), pp. 104–106
14. Robert Frost, ‘Blue Butterfly Day’, in Complete Poems of Robert Frost (1949). Henry Holt, New York.
15. See Butterfly Conservation website and follow the link ‘Why butterflies matter’.
1. Jeremy Thomas and Richard Lewington (2010), The Butterflies of Britain and Ireland. British Wildlife Publishing, Gillingham, p. 77.
2. Easily the most entertaining butterfly website is Matthew Oates’s, mainly on the Purple Emperor, ‘The Purple Empire’, created for ‘people of the purple persuasion’. See apaturairis.blogspot.com. There is a blog by Martin Warren, Richard Fox and others on the Butterfly Conservation website, link: butterfly-conservation.org/3114/blog.html.
3. As reported by Richard Fox and Nick Bowles in ‘Wildlife Reports’ (2014). British Wildlife, 26 (2), pp. 124–27.
4. Miriam Rothschild (1991), ‘Silk’, in Butterfly Cooing like a Dove. Doubleday, London, p. 67.