Rainbow Dust Three Centuries of Butterfly Delight

At the age of five, British writer and naturalist Peter Marren had what he refers to as his Nabokov moment, catching a butterfly and feeling its dust between his fingers. As he writes, The hands of 5-year-olds are damp and clumsy. When the butterfly slithered and shot out from between my fingers, I noticed that some of its colours had been left behind on my sweaty palm, like the imprint of a chalk drawing. I held my hand up to the sun and watched the particles shine and flicker: orange, yellow and black, in shimmery, summery specks....Of all the inconsequential things that happened to me when I was 5 falling down the rockery, piling cold Yorkshire sand into my Mickey Mouse bucket, sniveling over my uneatable school dinner this one stays bright after all the others have faded... It was a Nabokov Moment because only he could put into words what most of us can only feel: the frankly sensual moment in a child s life when the full force of nature is felt for the first time. It marks the first time when, to your vast surprise, the colours and scents and sounds of the natural world seem to imprint themselves inside you . Rainbow Dust celebrates the role that butterflies have played in engaging humans in the wonders of the natural worldin collecting, in taxonomy, and more recently in conservation. Mr. Marren is a gifted storyteller, and he in this literary net he captures the joy of discovery, the challenges of taxonomy, and the perils of climate change."