When I was little I was going to be an artist and world-renowned bat expert, who wrote novels whilst living on a farm with a collection of insects to rival that of the great London Museums. Whilst at 24 I still have some way to go before I achieve all of these dreams, I have never quite managed to leave behind the obsessive need to pick up every bug I find and the sun really seems to have brought out some treasures this week.
As yet I have never actually gone as far as pinning butterflies (I was vegetarian and a little oversensitive as a child; treading on a snail could induce floods of guilt based tears and I nearly caused a family-rift the day my grandfather tried to pour boiling water in an ants nest), but having read Kaelah's adventures in insect pinning I have to admit the idea is beginning to take hold. I don't think I could ever actually catch and kill a perfectly happy, flitting butterfly but perhaps a morbid hunt for their pretty cadavers is a possibility?
As yet I have never actually gone as far as pinning butterflies (I was vegetarian and a little oversensitive as a child; treading on a snail could induce floods of guilt based tears and I nearly caused a family-rift the day my grandfather tried to pour boiling water in an ants nest), but having read Kaelah's adventures in insect pinning I have to admit the idea is beginning to take hold. I don't think I could ever actually catch and kill a perfectly happy, flitting butterfly but perhaps a morbid hunt for their pretty cadavers is a possibility?
i adore entomology too! it's rare that one meets another person that is also interested in it! how did you first get into insects? for me, it was a combination of my ethnobotany class and one of my video games in which you can collect many different species of beetles!
ReplyDeleteI am painfully jealous - I've never had the opportunity to take a class in Entomology, let alone combined with botany, that sounds perfect!! How long did you get to do that for?
DeleteGrowing up my mum and I used to collect 'specimens' (i.e. all the caterpillars from the garden), identify them (with my kid's Book of Bugs) and keep them in the porch until butterfly'o'clock. I wish that was a real job! xx