Butterfly Nexus

Abstract

If I were young again, I’d start another butterfly collection tomorrow. Little has given me such pleasure in a long life as has science, and especially collecting butterflies and using them as tools to answer questions in evolution and ecology. And nothing has connected me to more adventures and interesting people. This was brought home to me again recently as I was going over my field notes from the summer of 1952, which I spent on Southampton Island in northern Hudson Bay working for the Canadian Defense Research Board and Department of Agriculture. I was doing biting fly surveys and general insect collecting (in those days the Reds were thought to be coming over the pole). I did the surveys, but the real reason I wanted to go to the Arctic was to study my favorite butterfly genus Erebia—and I owed the opportunity to a lepidopterist, Tom Freeman, head of the Northern Insect Survey. I met Tom at the first Lepidopterists’ Society meeting, in New York City. I had been directed to become a charter member of that organization when I was 15 by Charles Michener, then curator of Lepidoptera at the American Museum of Natural History, and later my major professor.