Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Forty Fifty

Last week, I shipped off the last of my butterfly collection, after 65 years.

We each have different, and sometimes mutually antagonistic, feelings about butterfly collecting. I’m not going to go into all that here. How every animal (including every human) takes life in order to live, and we each decide what we are willing to kill for how we wish to live: will we catch fish, and eat them? Swat a mosquito? Crush a clothes moth to save the cashmere, or pinch and pin a bigger, prettier lepidopteran to feed the mind and knowledge? We already know all the inconsistencies, small hypocrisies, and ethical gymnastics of our individual decisions. And we know that except for the occasional conversion, we’re not likely ever to see eye-to-eye when emotion outweighs the facts, as it sometimes will (sometimes for the better) for us all.

Nor do I need to recapitulate the extraordinary value of natural history collections to human culture and wellbeing over the centuries. How the assembly of long series of specimens from across their range may enable the study, classification, depiction, popularization, and ultimately protection of plants and animals otherwise likely to be destroyed along with their habitat before even being named. That this activity with insects comes at zero meaningful cost to the populations involved, for most species. And how without the collectors we would be in the dark about who and what we snap with our cameras-bereft of field guides, reference collections, experts, and scientific authority. No, this has all been said before.

Like many lepidopterists of the 20^th century, I began as a boy (it was mostly boys, mostly around that age). I’d been an utterly devoted seashell collector from the age of seven, but landlocked Colorado was a really dumb place to be a young conchologist, so I resorted to a Shell of the Month Club and other secondary sources. I began to notice checkered skippers and swallowtails in the vacant lots and parks, and that there were many more of them than the absent land snails I desperately longed for. Then one day in the spring of 1958 my stepbrother, Bruce Campbell, said he was going out to collect insects for a scouting merit badge, and invited me along. Of course I went. Bruce quit the next day. I quit last week.

This is not the place to describe the excitement of that initial field trip and every summer since, or to summarize the half-century-plus of adventure, learning, delight, satisfaction, intellectual fulfillment, bracing exercise, conservation awakening and a lifetime’s response, participation in a great enterprise of peers, pure thrill, peace, joy, frustration, fruitful collaboration, deep friendship and fellowship, identity, purpose, motivating love of land and life, worship of all habitats and their denizens, ultimate understanding of adaptation as the basis of everything that really matters, and just plain fun. As Vladimir Nabokov explained it for Vogue in 1972, when asked what made a perfect walk for him: “Any first walk in any new place-especially a place where no lepidopterist has been before me. There still exist unexplored mountains in Europe and I can still walk twenty kilometers a day. The ordinary stroller might feel on sauntering out a twinge of pleasure…but the cold of the metal netstick in my right hand magnifies the pleasure to almost intolerable bliss.

Not to say that this panoply of pleasures and personal contentment is not available through one’s camera or baby blues as well as a butterfly net. They aren’t the property of collectors alone. Let’s leave that there and ask a different question: with all of its benefits, why would I be leaving butterfly collecting now? And what does that really involve?

To do it right, making and keeping a worthwhile collection entails a lot of work. There is the safe storage of specimens until ready to prepare. Then     comes the moisture-relaxing of the dried insects, unless mounted while fresh, and the laborious, painstaking spreading itself. Every example must be properly labeled with at least minimal data, which takes a lot of time and effort. But it is essential. Unlabeled specimens are just curios. To give them their scientific value, and to justify and honor the lives taken, they must have data. From there, we need to care for the collection. Chiefly, this means keeping the specimens dry, cool, dark, and protected from insects that will inevitably destroy them if they gain access-chiefly carpet beetles (dermestids) and book lice (psocids). Air-tight storage, fumigation, and/or freezing are usually employed for this purpose. Anything less than careful curation is a travesty.

Some people are natural curators, for whom application of their dexterity and sense of order may give as much pleasure as the field work. Not me. Curating my growing collection was always a labor, but always worth it for its many satisfactions: studying, sharing, learning, constantly surrounded by beauty. I had the best science fair projects on wood nymph evolution and florescence of scales under ultraviolet. And for a curious fourteen-year-old, receiving packages of swapped specimens from Ukraine, Rhodesia, Yucatan, or Tennessee was more exciting than finding buried treasure. I joined the Lepidopterists’ Society as a kid in 1959, and many of my finest lifelong relationships grew out of that long affiliation. My collection made me the biologist I am, leading directly to the UW, JPP, WWB, Charles Remington, Yale, and my entire life since. But the time comes when the required output exceeds what one has left to put out.

But beyond the individual, what is the point? What becomes of all those felled fliers, and why? Many people think of butterfly collectors as they might stamp collectors, just gatherers of objects to which they take a fancy. That’s not fair to philatelists and certainly not lepidopterists. The reality is that much of the most valuable work in entomology is performed by self- taught amateurs (‘one who loves’), such as Charles Darwin himself. But the rationale doesn’t matter.

What does, is that when the personal need for private collections has finished, many of them end up donated to a university, city museum, or other institution, and become part of the great public repositories where civilization stores its treasures and builds its knowledge of the world and its works. Without the U. W.’s Burke Museum and its collection, curated in turn by the giants O. B. Johnson, Melville Hatch, and Jonathan Pelham, and my lucky association with it, there would have been no WWB, Cascadia, or Pyle & LaBar, in fact no RMP, JPP, or Idie Ulsh as you know and love them, and no WBA-just as the Lep Soc and NABA owed their existence to the collections of the American Museum of Natural History and Smithsonian. That the Audubon Society arose from Audubon the collector/killer is not a tragedy, but a happy inevitability. Ensuring the future of one’s private collection may be the collector’s most important duty.

Now, with so very many butterfly lovers loose upon the land, of course most of them must be non-lethal, or there actually could be a conservation problem with collecting. But we run the risk of swinging too far. There are fewer young collectors coming along, boys or girls, all the kids umbilically connected to devices instead of free outdoor play. Yet what remains to be learned from specimen-based research, more than anything the composition and ecological needs of the earth’s little-known and rapidly vanishing diversity, is profound. We need curious, dedicated young lepidopterists more than ever.

Norbert Kondla, one of the co-authors of the new Asher’s Blue, has been sharing many photographs of live and pinned arctic butterflies on the NW Leps list-serve lately, including highly variable lesser fritillaries and sulphurs. Some might be ap- palled at the sheer number of his beautifully prepared specimens. But if they were to examine the huge array of variation, and consider the truly vast landscape from which Norbert collected them, and finally consider the short- and long-term consequences for the Northlands from oil, climate change, and all the rest, they just might acquire a glimmer of the power of a butterfly collection as a crucial window on a world at risk.

And so I come to my own denouement as a collector. For many years I have spalled off parts of my precious leps to their forever homes: most of my original lode to the Burke long ago, when it came time to leave Seattle for years of travel, further study, and working elsewhere. Later, many specimens to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and others to both the AMNH and the USNM in New York and D. C.; and many more to the Burke over the following years. In more recent times, all of my Butterfly Big Year vouchers went into the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Bio- diversity in Gainesville, Florida, one of the most important collections anywhere. The bulk of what was left now resides in the Oregon State Arthropod Collection at OSU in Corvallis, our primary regional home for these priceless lives preserved. And just last week, I shipped off the last carton-long-saved 1960s and later material from my long- term study site of the High Line Canal in Colorado, many collected with my mother, as well as Rocky Mountain treasures that were hard to let go. They went to my boyhood second home, the Denver Museum of Science and Nature, back where it all began. These creatures carried not only great sentimental value, but conservation importance too, since most of those habitats and butterfly populations I grew up with and learned from are now gone. Had it not been for them, and the right books and people, I would not be who I am.

Does this mean I am hanging up my famous net, Marsha? Heck, no! I’ve actually collected relatively few butterflies for many years, preferring to enjoy them alive and having written the first American books on butterfly watching. I mean, who really likes to kill butterflies? I have done mostly catch and release for a long time, where it serves the purpose, taking specimens only when I judged it necessary for a particular research project, conservation survey, important distributional records, or the like. For example, my recent review of the Mariposa Copper with Paul Hammond, naming nine new subspecies and detailing acute conservation needs for several of them including the Makah Copper, depended on over 6,000 specimens from several museums, to get their identities, whereabouts, histories, and ecological requirements right. Some of these I had collected myself. But now? To the extent I can still go afield, I shall certainly swing my net, as it is no less fun and instructive than ever, and I still have so much to learn from the animals up close. But if I collect anything, it will go straight to Corvallis-no longer my responsibility. For above all, that’s what natural history collecting is: a big responsibility, to all those little lives: that they be honored by proper treatment, as the best hunters have always known; remembered for what they’ve taught us and brought us, and dedicated to the pursuit of truth, understanding, coexistence, and survival of their kind and all the others, in a world where the butterfly net can still be mightier than the bulldozer when wielded with right mind and kind hand.

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