Pursuit

For old time's sake, I spent this morning trekking through four miles of trails at the Bent of the River Audubon Center with about twenty members of the Connecticut Butterfly Society. I thought it was going to be a nice little lecture about monarch and swallow tail butterflies and then go outside and see if we could find a few. But no, these guys were in serious pursuit of catching and identifying anything that flew, except birds.

They could identify every variety of dragon fly and could tell the difference between a male and female orange sulfur butterfly fifty feet over their heads, but because it was a mixed group, I didn't ask what the discerning difference was. I just used my imagination and took them at their word.

The last time I went butterfly hunting was more than fifty years ago for my a ninth grade science project. I think I had a choice of dissecting a frog, collecting rocks, or catching butterflies. I chose to capture butterflies in a net put them in a jar of tetrachloride to die and then stick pins through them to mount each one on a board under glass. I'm not sure how many I really caught, or how many I used from my brother's same assignment six years earlier to fill in the gap.