A Palette of Wings: The Natural History of Butterfly Collecting

Nothing quite evokes for me, the peculiar sensibility of the Victorians, as a butterfly house. It exemplifies their addiction to artifice combined with the honed sympathy to nature that characterised much of the writing, art and music of that period.
There is nothing quite as transporting as stepping inside the glass walls out of a nippy July day into the fecund wet warmth of the tropics, amid floating bright-hued wings.

Perhaps less pysically evocative, but equally nostalgic are the great collections of insects from that age housed in natural history museums around the world.
It is astonishing to imagine when looking upon a collection:( row upon row of winged insects, levitating on slender pins, described in spidery and fading sepia) that each specimen represented a capture. Somewhere in a wilderness, perhaps a jungle, perhaps on a mountain pass, a hunter persued his quarry. The image though, always strikes me as somewhat absurd. I can’t help but imagine a bearded man in long socks nimbly skipping about with a butterfly net.

The business of butterfly hunting in the late 1800’s, however, was a serious one indeed.
Large military style colonial expeditions were devoted to the pursuit of specimens into South America and Central Africa. One such expedition into Equitoria resulted in over four hundred of the seven hundred men who had set out, dying of malnourishment, disease and animal attacks.
Specimens, once captured, had to be quickly killed in order to avoid damage, and then dried, with closed wings and placed in stiff paper triangles for safe transport.
Keeping the specimens free of mildew and protected from infestation by other insects proved a monumental task. It astonishes really how many specimens survived the journey intact.

Once returned, the butterfly specimens had to undergo a process that is the same one Igor and I use in the shop today. The specimens are placed, still in their paper triangles, in a humid environment in order for them to soften. This process, called relaxing, can take from 18 to 48 hours depending on each specimen. The butterflies are then removed from their paper packaging and held by the thorax between the thumb and first finger.
Then, tweezer style, one pinches the thorax just below the wings, and as though sunning itself in your hand, the butterfly opens its wings. The next stage I always find painstaking. Each wing must be separated, stretched and then held in place on balsa or foam-board. The wings are secured with slips of paper, which are pinned down. The antennae are tweaked into alignment and similarly secured with paper and then two or three days later..voila! -a butterfly ready for mounting.

In the shop, we mount each insect in the traditional manner - with entomology pins.
Each butterfly or beetle is framed separately on a facsimile 1930’s map of the area the specimen was found in.
In the natural history museums, the specimens are also mounted with pins going through a tiny slip of paper with the classification of the insect, date of collection and collectors name. The butterflies go into drawers- hundreds, sometimes thousands of them.
Because most Natural History Museums arrange their collections systematically, that is by species, many unique collections will become scattered throughout the entire museum inventory. The United Kingdom Natural History Museum alone has over 10,000 drawers of insect specimens. The entire collection is an amalgam of bequeathed collections, recent specimens captured by museum staff, specimens sent in by enthusiasts and collections from the great Victorian Colonial Expeditions.