Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty Nine

We often overhear butterfliers discussing their fellow adherents in terms of their presumed status or stature, and the terms frequently employed include “professional” and “amateur.” Sometimes a simple distinction is intended between those who spend a lot of time on their butterfly work, and really know their stuff, vs. those who ply the activity as a simple hobby or pleasant pastime. And other times we’ll hear the terms applied as either a compliment or derogation: “She’s really a pro!” vs. “Oh, he’s just an amateur.” I’d like to take on those terms to ask what they really mean, and to suggest that our tradition draws deeply from and continues to depend upon both a few professional lepidopterists and a big happy band of amateurs.

First, the terms themselves. “Professional” implies that one actually makes his or her livelihood from a given activity. There used to be a few dozen or scores of professional lepidopterists around the country, mostly working in universities, museums, government agencies and departments, or institutions such as the Smithsonian. Today, because of the decline of traditional systematics (the study of relationships among organisms), there are far fewer scientists who are actually paid to build and maintain collections and work with them for research publications. A number of professionals remain employed in colleges, genetics and genomics labs, agricultural departments, and conservation organizations and agencies. But the present-day total of professional butterfly experts in the strict sense is quite small.

“Amateur,” on the other hand, is often construed as a pejorative, one who has only middling ambitions to understand or advance a field, and who lacks both the acumen and resources of the professionals. The resources part is usually true, but not necessarily the rest. After all, the word “amateur” means “one who loves”-and by extension, one who engages in a given activity out of love for it-a labor of love. Far from a put-down, “amateur” actually denotes a person deeply engaged in a given pursuit strictly out of his or her own choice, and there- fore often rising to a position of expertise and respect in a given field out of sheer enthusiasm and talent. The pros do it out of love too-certainly not for the money!

What might surprise you is the fact that a great deal of the most valuable butterfly science (and it is true for every other branch as well) has always come from the labors of the amateurs, often mentored by the few professionals. Charles Darwin was an amateur, for instance! So were Gregor Mendel, Bates, Wallace, Rothschild & Jordan, Miriam Rothschild, and many other names with whom we are familiar in early and later butterfly studies. Or if they were paid for their work, it was as professional collectors for others, doing their own science on the side. Or they were wealthy and able to subsidize their own studies, like the Rothschilds. William H. Edwards ran a coal mine, and many of the other pioneers had other jobs or professions. Boisduval in Paris was one of the few who actually were paid to pursue Lepidoptera studies, as was Vladimir Nabokov at Harvard before his literary career really took off. But the fact is, our collective gathering of butterfly knowledge is the product of a great mix of pro-am cooperation.

Not that this ideal is universal, or came about accidentally. I was shocked, when pursuing studies in butterfly conservation in Britain in 1971-72, to find there was quite a gulf between the professional entomologists and the amateurs. They had their own organizations, meetings, and journals. There is no question that class played a part in this, and education, and accent. I found myself having to broker between the two groups in order to achieve certain conservation goals.

The outright silliness of the pro-am scam in the U.K. was well illustrated by my mentor at Monks Wood Experimental Station and godfather of the Xerces Society, John Heath. He was arguably one of the main professional lepidopterists in Great Britain, founding and running the British Butterfly Recording Scheme, the oldest and by far largest such butterfly records bank in the world. Yet he had no letters after his name, had never attended university, and came into the government ecology agency right out of nowhere but his amateur devotion. John utterly confounded the prevailing prejudices. This schism in Britain has since eroded to a large extent, if not completely. But I also discovered that it was even more pronounced in Spain and in Mexico, where there really were two almost separate Lepidoptera wings, those associated with the universities and those who were not. Eventually both sides found that they depended on one another when it came to conservation, but it isn’t easy breaking down old divisions and snobberies. And the snobbery can cut both ways: some amateurs resent the pros, calling them a privileged elite just in it for the job; and that’s just as silly.

Happily, the picture has been quite different in the United States. Less class-ridden from the get-go, American field science always drew upon the country nature-study tradition as well as that of the academy. I recommend reading William Leach’s Butterfly People (Pantheon, 2013) to get a good sense of the origins of American butterfly studies in the nineteenth century. So there was never a great barrier to break down, not to say there weren’t academic snobs here too. But the most salient point is the overt ethic that went into founding the Lepidopterist’s Society in 1947. The co-founders, Charles Lee Remington and Harry Clench, were card-carrying professionals, from Yale University and the Carnegie Institute respectively. Yet they both realized profoundly that butterfly and moth science had derived much of its strength and vitality, not to mention outright work and results, from amateurs. They made it clear in the founding charter that the Society was intended for equal access and participation of both scientists and field naturalists-or, professionals and amateurs, if you will. They made sure the Society’s Journal catered to both, with refereed papers and a section entitled “Especially for Field Collectors.” This marvelous precedent made sure that the Lep Soc (as it is often dubbed) has never become riven over false issues of inclusiveness, and that butterfly and moth study has been as robust as possible, drawing from all kinds of experience and expertise, professional and amateur, working together. To see this idea in action, visit the annual autumn gathering of the very informal Northwest Lepidopterists’ Association in Corvallis.

In the modern era of butterfly watching and photography alongside traditional collecting and lab science, the role of the “one who loves” has grown only more powerful. Forgive me, but we can date this era roughly from Watching Washington Butterflies in 1974 (Seattle Audubon Society). My hope with that book was to draw lots of people who find butterflies intriguing into observing, photographing, and otherwise studying and enjoying them, alongside the small existing cadres of collectors and scientists. Well, we all know where that has gone! Spurred on further by a succession of field guides, NABA, the internet, and digital photography, the ranks of butterfly and moth lovers has grown beyond all expected bounds, and continues to mushroom. WBA is their natural habitat.

One of the most exciting developments in town-gown cooperation has been in the growth of citizen science. The volunteers, or “citizen scientists,” do not generally perform science as such, which involves controlled experiments and statistical analysis. But they do undertake a vast amount of data gathering that feeds into the actual science, and in many cases makes it possible. Who could count the number of ‘Pollard Walks’ -disciplined counting of butterflies along repeated transects with a precise protocol-that have been taken? These transects have enabled and informed any number of conservation, restoration, and management projects, as well as basic population biology of rare species. They are named, by the way, for a colleague of John Heath’s at Monks Wood, Ernie Pollard, who came up with the methodology. I saw him recently at a fellow colleague’s memorial at Ely Cathedral. Ernie had no idea that his name would become attached to so many butterfly transects walked all over the world by devoted amateurs-almost a synonym for citizen science.

So what is our pro-am profile among lepidopterists in the Pacific Northwest? We have maybe a dozen lepidopterists in Washington and Oregon who make their living in whole or in part by researching, curating, managing, teaching about, or otherwise dealing with Lepidoptera. We rely on them all for their trained insight, experience, knowledge, and findings. And all the rest of us are some flavor or other of amateurs. I include myself: I have been a pro, in New Guinea and elsewhere. But now butterflies are my avocation, not my vocation. And I consider myself to be in very good company.

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