Watching Washington Butterflies With Bob Pyle: Number Twelve

Have you ever been thinking about a butterfly named for someone-Milbert’s Tortoiseshell, for example-and wondered, who the heck was Milbert? Or maybe Boisduval’s blue: so who was he, and why was he a big enough deal to make me try to pronounce his name?

When I was a lad, my radical metamorphosis from a mad-keen kid conchologist (bad choice in Colorado) into mad-keen kid lepidopterist (much more adaptive) was ushered in with the help of three books in particular: Colorado Butterflies by F. Martin Brown, Don Eff, and Bernard Rotger, my dad’s Christmas gift in 1958; W. J. Holland’s Butterfly Book, from my mother a year later; and A. B. Klots’s A Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America, East of the Great Plains, number 4 in the Peterson series– the first book I ever bought with my own money. So the names of these authors were some of the first I knew among the famous lepidopterists. Then as I read and used those delicious tomes, I became familiar with more and more such names, mostly from an earlier era: W. H. Edwards, Henry Edwards, Mead, Bruce, Scudder, Strecker, Boisduval, Lorquin, Drury, Fabricius, Latreille, French, Abbott, Kramer, Behr, Huebner, Lucas, Kirby, Barnes & Benjamin, Reakirt, Ménétries, Grote, Godart, Lintner, Linnaeus, Butler, and many others.

These names might be found, for example, at the end of the scientific epithet, in roman type, denoting a species’ author: the person who described and named it in the scientific literature. For example: Plebejus icarioides (Boisduval). The author’s name appears in parentheses if the species has since been reassigned to a different genus than the one in which he placed it. If the genus is still the same, there are no parentheses. Hence: Plebejus icarioides (Boisduval), since Boisduval originally designated it Lycaena icarioides; but Echinargus isola Reakirt, since Reakirt named the species exactly that. The author’s name sometimes provides the common name too, as in Boisduval’s blue and Reakirt’s blue.

Or, a lepidopterist’s name might become part of the scientific epithet, by way of an honor. Such monikers are known as patronyms: Hesperia lindseyi Holland, Pieris beckerii W. H. Edwards, and Nymphalis milberti

(Godart) are examples. These honorarials often translate into the English common name as well: Lindsey’s skipper, Becker’s white, Milbert’s tortoiseshell. Not as often as with plants, but now and then, a whole genus of butterflies has been named for a person, such as Speyeria, the greater fritillaries, designated thus by Scudder for Adolph Speyer.

Some people oppose patronymics because of their deep-held feeling that we somehow cheapen, compromise, or appropriate organisms by presuming to name them after people; they con- sider it an imperial act, or at least arrogant in the extreme. There may indeed have been an element of hubris among the early animal explorers, as well as a presumption that commercial utility to hu- mans was the highest value of their discoveries. And there is no doubt that many of the namers, by far mostly male, were neither short of ego nor shy about expressing it, or stroking those of their friends, by stacking up the patronyms.

On the other hand, I am equally confident that many descriptions capped with a patronym merely intended to honor the hard, devoted, often heroic field work of those individuals who first brought their namesakes to scientific light. This practice continues today (e.g., Oeneis buddha pelhami). And while many of us would prefer a name that actually told us something about the insect in terms of its range (Colias occidentalis, the western sulphur), host plant (Celastrina humuli, the hops azure), markings (Polygonia interrogationis, the question mark), size (Colias gigantea, the giant sulphur) or habitat (Callophrys dumetorum, the bramble hairstreak), there is something to be said for animal names composed of people’s names, as well.

Chief among these pluses is the fact that patronyms and the names of the authors of original descriptions are rich in stories. If we pay attention, ask questions, and dig a little bit, we find that these names bear the very history and lore of the field we find so intensely interesting. And history is always worth looking into and conserving, if only for its sheer fascination, and it should never be forgotten. These name-names help to connect us to those who went before, and who found, sorted out, and first studied the creatures about which we care so much. So, to paraphrase Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s famous line, who were those guys?

I have space to mention only a few, and briefly. But even a curt roll-call of the pioneer lepists reads like the cast and libretto for some dramatic opera:

William Henry Edwards, the owner and manager of a Pennsylvania coal mine, became the greatest student of butterfly life histories and the impoverished author and artist of a grand trilogy of superbly illustrated volumes, The Butterflies of North America. In many ways, Edwards can be considered the Audubon of American butterflies. Though he seldom traveled far beyond Coalburgh, he sent young men westward to collect butterflies and their eggs for him, including David Bruce,

who sent back Magdalena alpine eggs; and Theodore Mead, who courted Edward’s daughter, named Edith’s copper for her, and later married her.

Samuel Scudder, a brilliant Boston polymath, produced his own three-volume series on the Butterflies of the Eastern United States, which many felt to be the best butterfly books ever; and became the greatest authority on fossil butterflies. In the intellectual orbit of Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, a fervent Darwin-denier, Scudder struggled with Edwards over evolution, but eventually came around.

Henry Edwards, a famous San Francisco actor, befriended his unrelated namesake W. H. Ed-

Lorquin’s Admiral (D. Droppers)

wards and served as the source of a great deal of new material from the West Coast. Jean Baptiste Boisduval was a Parisian physician who became a preeminent European lepidopterist of his time. He described many new species of butterflies from the American West, sent him by cadres of traveling collectors. These include the Xerces, Arrowhead, and of course Boisduval’s blues. Pierre Lorquin, one of Boisduval’s collectors in the Wild West, hunted both butterflies and gold in California from 1849-1858. He did better with butterflies; both Lorquin’s admiral and the gold- hunter’s hairstreak were finds of his. He must have been tough, walking through the swinging doors of those Roaring Forties saloons with a butterfly net.

Herman Strecker was a stone-carver in Reading, Pennsylvania who, despite the modest rewards and long hours of his work, managed to accumulate one of the largest and most important American butterfly collections ever. Irreligious, unlike his Lutheran family, he embraced Darwin and named a beautiful silk moth Eudaimonia (now Copiopteryx) jehovah, as well as the all-black Erebia magdalena. Herman Behr, one of Strecker’s West Coast pen-pals, made great inroads in Bay-area butterfly studies and beyond, but lost his collection in the San Francisco fire and earthquake of 1906. Augustus Grote, a fellow German immigrant and noctuid specialist, also began as great friends with Strecker; but their relationship quickly soured over many issues, and their voluminous correspondence dripped with an acid that would make today’s nastiest e-mail flame wars seem polite, not to mention inarticulate. As an example of his invective, he named Strecker as a member of “a certain class of collectors who ‘covet’ diverse and pretty specimens without any higher philosophical value,” and it got much worse (see W. Leach reference below).

Tryon Reakirt, who made lead products in Philadelphia, shared Strecker’s love of exotic species. He described a number of “new species” that he thought he had identified among purchased lots, but most turned out to be synonyms of butterflies already named in Europe (a common fate in the days of stagecoach taxonomy). The tiny Reakirt’s blue, however, still stands as a good species to- day.

And as for Milbert, for whom the French entomologist Jean Baptiste Godart named Aglais milberti, who was he? In spite of James Scott’s dismissal of him as “brother of Filbert, some kind of a nut,” Jacques-Gérard Milbert was a French naturalist and artist and recipient of the Légion d’honneur. He traveled to New York in 1815 and sent back 48 shipments of natural history specimens to Paris over the next eight years. Among these was the type specimen of Milbert’s tortoiseshell, or the fire-rim, as James Scott would prefer to call it.

So I hope you can see that a little attention to the names surrounding our beloved butterflies will repay us in a wealth of human interest, as well as context for the development of our studies. Without the labors of these forebears, in field, lab, and ship- ping office, often dangerous and daunting and against great obstacles, we would not have the benefit of our lists, field guides, or museum collections today; we’d be starting from scratch. If you would like to deepen your familiarity with these pioneers, I recommend that you mine the ever-enriching pages of Jonathan Pelham’s Catalogue of the Butterflies of the United States and Canada. By following through the nomenclatural history of our butterflies, one can parse the contributions of all these and more.

There are good published accounts available of the field itineraries and exploratory adventures of Theodore Mead and Pierre Lorquin as they traveled the unsampled western habitats by narrow-gauge and stage. And a wonderful forthcoming book, Butterfly People: An American Encounter with the Beauty of the World, by historian and lepidopterist William Leach, will be a great boon to all who care to learn more about the ones who went before. I was privileged to review an advance copy of Butterfly People, and it was my source for many of the facts in this column. It promises a thoroughly delightful, dramatic, and engaging read for all contemporary butterfly people, who will never again have to wonder, “who were those guys?”

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