In pursuit of Denmark’s butterflies

The Butterfly Season: On Beginnings, Endings, and the Life in Between, Lea Korsgaard (translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg), Particular Books, £24

In 2010 the nature writer Patrick Barkham published The Butterfly Isles, a book that has since become something of a classic of butterfly literature. In it he recounted how, the previous year, he had embarked on a mission to see and photograph every species of British butterfly in a single season. Fifteen years later, Lea Korsgaard, a Danish journalist and author, set out to do exactly the same thing with the butterflies of Denmark – where the number of species is very slightly higher than in the United Kingdom (64 to 59).

So far, so similar – but The Butterfly Season is a very different book from The Butterfly Isles, and Korsgaard’s motivation is very different from Barkham’s. Indeed, her motivation, at least when she starts out on her mission, is hard to discern: whereas Barkham had been a butterfly lover from boyhood and knew his butterflies well, Korsgaard frankly admits that ‘when I got the idea, I knew almost nothing about butterflies. How many species would there even be? Ten? Ten thousand? I had no idea’. And yet, she feels something drawing her into her project, something made up in part of a sense of urgency, a need to see Denmark’s butterflies while they are still there to be seen. Barkham was also driven by a similar sense, and it is well based: butterfly populations, like many other insect populations, have been in decline for a century and more, and both Denmark and Britain are at the northern limit of many species’ range, making their survival precarious. Things are far worse in Denmark than in Britain: 12 species have been lost since the 1960s, and 37 of the rest are on the red list of endangered species.

Korsgaard has a steep learning curve ahead of her. With touching naïveté, she makes her first butterfly-hunting expedition, to north Jutland. There, she knows that three hard-to-find species can be seen – but not, as she soon finds out, simply by going there and walking around. Drawing a blank, she concludes, reasonably enough, that ‘I was bad at finding butterflies’. She needs help – as Barkham also did, relying on a network of experts with precise local knowledge and experience. Luckily, she finds Emil, a 23-year-old biology student who is already one of Denmark’s top butterfly authorities. With his help, Korsgaard, in a fine stroke of beginner’s luck, immediately finds Denmark’s rarest species (the Northern Chequered Skipper), soon to be followed by another Danish rarity (the Pearl-Bordered Fritillary) – and the quest is properly under way. She has, fortunately for her, many more online resources at her disposal than Barkham, with a wealth of websites, apps and portals devoted to butterflies, not to mention 15 years’ worth of advances in mobile technology.

A curious feature of The Butterfly Season – one that might be inferred from its subtitle, On Beginnings, Endings, and the Life Between – is how little of it is devoted to actually writing about the species the author is seeking. She often seems strangely incurious about them, and has little to tell us about their particularities, preferring to take off into autobiography, philosophy, metaphysics, religion, myth and, regrettably, politics (progressive, of course). This is symptomatic of the way in which nature writing has developed in recent years, embracing the confessional, the spiritual and the therapeutic. Korsgaard is especially fascinated by metamorphosis, by the possibilities of change, a subject she pursues throughout the book, in various forms. She writes interestingly about the 17th-century Dutch biologist and microscopist Jan Swammerdam, whose researches led him to conclude that God and Nature are one and the same (though he later recanted). She tells the story of Margaret Fountaine, the much-travelled butterfly collector whose eye-popping diaries formed the basis of two big-selling books, Love Among the Butterflies and Butterflies and Late Loves, and she is very excited to discover that Freud’s most famous patient, the ‘Wolf Man’, suffered from Schmetterlingsphobie, fear of butterflies, a fear triggered in boyhood by the sight of a Swallowtail opening and closing its wings. Freud concluded that this spectacle suggested to him a woman opening her legs, and his efforts to suppress a traumatic early memory of seeing just that had created his phobia. This, one fears, would not have impressed Vladimir Nabokov, who, as a unique example of a serious lepidopterist and great writer, naturally looms large and is much quoted in Korsgaard’s book.

There are times in The Butterfly Season when a reader might weary of the author’s company, especially in the more autobiographical passages, though she writes interestingly about her grandfather, a nature-loving pastor and writer. Some scenes of family life are related rather too circumstantially, and a visit to Denmark’s leading entomologist, Michael Stoltze, is recounted at excessive length, their conversation painstakingly transcribed.

However, things come together in surprising ways towards the end of the book. On holiday in France, Korsgaard realises that she now has an ‘informed eye’ – she is seeing and learning as never before, and her relationship with the butterflies of her native land is deepening. At a butterfly exhibition in Saint-Malo, she discovers that it is her relatively unspectacular Danish butterflies that she loves, not the gaudy, exotic beauties on display. The climactic moment of the book comes when she is on a butterfly-hunting trip with her mother in north Jutland. As the two of them sit on a beach at the end of a day among the butterflies, the glorious vista of sea, land and sunset sky suddenly seems to offer ‘a vision of perfection, almost paralysing in its beauty and magnitude. What I saw was eternity. That is the best way I can describe it…’

And what she felt, intensely, was ‘what the wise have known for thousands of years – that everything is connected’. Her mission was over, but something had happened, something that led her to conclude that ‘this was not the end; this had only just begun’.