Butterfly Collecting

When I was young, much younger than yesterday, my dad and I would go butterfly hunting. He would furnish me with a net and a hat and together we would trample through a field looking for butterflies. The most coveted was the Monarch and the Morning Cloak. The Monarch because of its orange and black beauty (it is the king of the butterflies) and the Morning Cloak because of its elusiveness. If we caught one, we would make sure that we didn’t already have it at home. We were collectors. We held to the unwritten rule that we collect only one male and female from each species. If it was a new one, we would kill it with a drop of alcohol and pin it to a piece of balsa wood, readying it for mounting in our collection. I still have some of my collection forty years later.

In today’s world, it is much easier to collect butterfiles. All we have to do is visit a butterfly museum where we can walk around with our cameras and shoot butterflies. Nobody cares if we collect hundreds of the same species, looking for the pristine butterfly. We don’t harm then a bit. We never touch a single one. Yesterday, we went to the Butterfly Wonderworld where I added some new butterflies to my collection, a Paper Kite, a Pearl Charaxes (from Africa!), a Blue Morpho, and a Tailed Green Jay.

Can you match the photo to the name?