Wendy Williams is an enthusiast, and enthusiasm is infectious. Lepidoptery is for her a new fascination, and it shows. On the plus side, her excitement shimmers as freshly as a newly-hatched Adonis Blue. She marvels, and makes us marvel, at the miracles she discovers.
She wonders at the strangeness of a butterfly’s proboscis, which is not, as it appears, a drinking straw (even butterflies cannot suck through a straw longer than their own bodies), but works by capillary action, blotting up fluids and sending saliva down to dissolve sticky or solid secretions. Moths show more variety in their diet, as adults as well as caterpillars — but then there are more than 160,000 known species of moth, and fewer than 20,000 butterflies: there are vampire ones in Siberia and a moth in Madagascar which uses its barbed proboscis to harpoon the eyelids of sleeping birds and drink their tears.
Williams concentrates on butterflies, and chiefly on one species, the Monarch.
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