In 1979, despite the best efforts of scientists for more than a century, a butterfly called the British Large Blue became extinct. There is widespread concern about the more recent decline in butterfly populations, but the American ecologist Nick Haddad writes that the collective weight of the known populations of the five rarest butterflies he discusses in his sobering book is just ‘three pounds five ounces — as much as one panda’s paw’. The special importance of butterflies, he argues, is that they provide lessons about the decline and management of other threatened species.
The fate of the British Large Blue shows how difficult it can be to conserve a creature that requires very specific conditions in order to survive: not only wild thyme, its main food source, but also colonies of a particular species of ant on which the caterpillars preyed and which itself favoured steep, south-facing slopes, and rabbits to keep the grasses to less than 2.1 inches high. Human encroachment and myxomatosis did their worst, and by the time scientists had worked out the butterfly’s reliance upon maintained habitat and species co-operation it was too late.
Among the butterflies Haddad discusses are the Bay Checkerspot, the Crystal Skipper and St Francis’s Satyr, names as lovely as the insects themselves. How butterflies and moths acquired such names is the subject of Peter Marren’s splendid and absorbing Emperors, Admirals and Chimney Sweepers. He provides an informative and nicely anecdotal history of naming, and then conducts the reader on an entertaining stroll through various categories of names, arranged alphabetically from Abundance (and scarcity) to the letters Y and Z (in the form of wing markings), taking time also to elucidate some of the scientific names alongside the English ones.
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