Emporers and Admirals

Grey Granite very much enjoyed this review by Richard Mabey in yesterday's Guardian and empathises with Patrick Barkham's enthusiasm .She wonders if Barkham was inspiredto carry out his quest by reading Charlie Elder's 'While Flocks Last'

The Butterfly Isles: A Summer in Search of Our Emperors and Admirals


by Patrick Barkham

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote that he loved to "drop in, as it were, on a familiar butterfly in his particular habitat, in order to see if he has emerged, and if so, how he is doing". This was an untypically chirpy remark from the doyen of literary lepidopterists, and not quite in the mood of Guardian journalist Patrick Barkham when he set out on his extraordinary odyssey.


In 2009, strung out by urban angst, he decided to try to see every one of Britain's 59 species of native butterfly in a single summer. As an achievable task, slugs, at 23 species, would have been easier, but might not have made such a beguiling book.


Why do men – especially men – take on such acquisitive challenges? "Because they're there" would be an odd answer for such exquisite, myth-bound creatures as butterflies, and smack of bathos. But Barkham has a more powerful motive. For him the universe of butterflies is like Alain-Fournier's Lost Domain, a place of elusive and endangered beauty, charged with the lost freedoms and magic of childhood. In a brilliant opening chapter, he recalls a summer's day when he was eight years old on the north Norfolk coast. He is butterfly-hunting with his dad (a heroic character throughout the story) when they spot "a grey arrow flying low over the clumps of marram". It resolves into a Brown Argus — tiny, unprepossessing, difficult to distinguish. But when it spreads its wings it is a revelation: "A deep chocolate colour spread from the orange studs bordering the wings right into the soft brown hairs of its delicate body" – a metamorphosis as astonishing as that from caterpillar to butterfly.

Nearly 30 years on, he is still in thrall to the paradoxical beauty of insignificant things. It's a magnetism that depends partly on particularity (which makes his desire to collect a full suite perfectly understandable) but also on "fit". His evocative descriptions of the baking sand-dunes, and the Argus's flight through them, are intimations of a deeper vein of connectivity that unfolds during his summer's quest.

Landscapes are powerful presences throughout the book. He begins in the scrubby wasteland outside Bullingdon prison in late February, searching for the minute eggs of the Brown Hairstreak, whose emerged imago is the very last of the 59 species he sees in August: "I lightly held a slender branch of blackthorn, turned it gently to the light and systematically ran my eye along it, checking at every joint of a twig." Every thing in its exact place. In the months between he criss-crosses Britain, recording his search in this same vivid, adept, unapologetic voice, wonderfully catching the spirit of these ethereal creatures. He hopes, like Tove Jansson's Moomintroll, to see a lucky yellow butterfly, a Brimstone, as his first of the spring, but is baptised instead by a Small Tortoiseshell in his mum's garden, "the labrador of the butterfly world". In May he is caught up in the epic migration of Painted Ladies, a scarcely credible diaspora that takes them from north Africa to Iceland. On Start Point in Devon he and his dad find Pearl-bordered Fritillaries, distinguished by a single lustrous silver cell on the hindwing.


The minutely detailed patternings of butterflies are one of their mysteries, as the sexes find each other chiefly by smell. The male Adonis Blue (pictured) becomes so intoxicated by the female's pheromones that he punctures the pupa and mates with the female before she has hatched. Humans can sometimes detect butterfly odours, too. Barkham is tickled by the image of venerable professors "inhaling deeply over [a] prone downy body", and reports that the Meadow Brown is like "old cigar-box", the Wall Brown "heavy and sweet, like chocolate cream".

And a few butterflies can indisputably smell the odours of the human world. Picture this scene in an ancient hunting forest in the Midlands. Five tables covered with white cloths, and set with paper plates of rotten banana, dead mudfish, and Big Cock shrimp paste. The maître d' is the National Trust's rumbustious butterfly adviser, Matthew Oates, sporting a purple notepad and a purple band in his sunhat. The feast is an art event run by a local gallery, designed to attract the fabled Purple Emperor, whose gothic glamour is enhanced by the fact that it is, so to speak, more of a necrophile than a nectarphile.


Oates is one of many extravagant butterfly lovers (including Grimaldi and Churchill) to flutter through the book, but is most important because he introduces Barkham to the Welsh concept of cynefin – "a place of personal belonging". Butterflies have intense cynefin, which is why they are so vulnerable to change. The larvae of the Large Blue, whose life-cycle and rescue from extinction makes for the most extraordinary story in the book, can only exist in intimate partnership with one particular species of red ant.


And in the end Barkham discovers his own sense of cynefin. Suffering from "butterfly burnout" and dumped by his girlfriend, a reluctant "butterfly widow", he finds his senses – as they can in times of distress – start bristling like antennae. He finds he has become a dowser. Lost in a dark and rain-sodden Surrey wood, inexplicably scared, he discovers his grail, the ghostly Wood White, "the shape of a droplet of water, hung on a leaf nearby". He understands that its "ability just to be, and live fully in the present" – and in the present place – is exactly what he gets from butterfly watching. He has become butterfly-brained – not, in his case, a term of derision, but exactly catching the way his darting and discursive narrative reflects the lives of his familiars and his sense of empathy with them.