The Language of Butterflies
by Wendy Williams (pub. 2020)
Wendy Williams has created a wonderful book that illuminates the beauty and resilience of butterflies and the passions of artists, collectors, and scientists. She weaves science, history, and culture with her own personal narrative.
She travels North America and takes us worldwide to see and learn about these amazing creatures in such places as Florissant, Colorado in the United States and in Michoacan, Mexico. We are treated to wonderful stories of Charles Darwin, banker Walter Rothschild, Henry Wallace Bates and his travels to South America, author Vladimir Nabokov, and Maria Sibylla Merian, a seventeenth-century artist and notetaker who was an expert on the life cycle of the butterfly.
Ms. Williams looks not only to the past; she also describes modern science studies, tagging and tracking programs, and restoration and establishment of preserves in places ranging from the Wildes in Ohio, the Tribal Alliance for Pollinators in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Albany Pine Brush Preserve in New York and the Scablands in Washington State. Modern studies about the physical characteristics of butterflies such as their proboscis and wing scales, life cycle, and guidance systems are very interesting.
The Butterfly Highway chapter describes the three flyways in North America: West, Central, and Eastern. In the West, migration is mainly to southern California, while the Central and Eastern flyways lead to the mountains in Michoacan, Mexico.
Illustrative butterfly species in the book include the Monarch, Blue Morpho, Little Blue, Karner Blue, Vampire Butterfly, and Fender’s Blue. There are other butterflies mentioned in the descriptions of the preserves.
This book introduces the content with interesting and short quotations. Two quotations in particular caught my eye. The first, “Nature has a perverse preference for the six-legged“ refers to insects in general. The second, “a rain of golden sequins” is a lovely description of the Monarchs.
I am sure you will enjoy reading this book about one of the most beautiful and fascinating species on earth.
Holly Sparrow, Headwaters Master Gardener