To net or not, collect or not.

As I get back into butterflying, after over 65 years of little involvement, I’m struck by its many dimensions as well as the bits of dogma that have grown up around it. As a youngster back when virtually no one challenged catching, killing, and sticking pins through the beasts, I was driven by a primitive desire to possess and fascination and, in the spirit of “listing” and “collecting,” was always delighted to add a new species or a more perfect specimen for one I already had.

From this background, I’m now struck by controversy over whether to net or not to net as well as widespread discomfort with “collecting.” Butterflying has an obvious spectrum or gradient from awe, emotion, and aesthetic delight at one end through “listing” and collecting trophy photographs toward the middle and on to serious collecting and scientific study at the other end, with legitimacy along most points in between.

At least from my perspective, some of the choices along the gradient seem to be based on shaky assumptions. Arguments against netting seem to assume, usually incorrectly, that it is quite disruptive to populations and conservation. I’m more comfortable with arguments that foregoing the net is more sporting and requires more skill, or that photos make better “trophies,” or even a straightforward emotional/aesthetic preference for minimal harassment. Most of us share a revulsion against causing unnecessary harm or suffering to any living thing. But, given the huge array of things that cause butterfly mortality, the occasional damage to one that is netted, examined, and released is tiny. Unless one is taking multiple specimens from a small or threatened population, the same can usually be said even for collecting, especially for occasional voucher specimens for study or verification of species distributions.

While foregoing the net or collecting makes a nice statement of our concern, in truth we impact butterflies and other species far more by our collective destruction of habitat–for housing, farms, freeways, shopping malls, energy production, etc., etc.-­ than by any direct harassing or collecting. The way our society is organized, it’s extremely difficult to remove ourselves from these collective impacts, especially with growth and rate of growth having become the standard measures of what is claimed as “good.” Yet growth is the very thing that is swallowing and disrupting habitats. On the brighter side, involving ourselves with butterflies, birds, flowers, salmon, or other species helps us understand what we are doing, to ourselves as well as the other species with whom we share the planet.

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