Collecting Butterflies

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In 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, world exploration was exploding. Return voyages from far postmarks and lands with strange names yielded curious specimens of plant and animal. Naturalists rushed to collect and name these species, working to figure out how one might be related to another. The cabinet of curiosities became the manner of exhibition for the collections of naturalists. Tiny museums of the strange, these cabinets housed butterflies and corals, snakes preserved in alcohol and pressed flowers, shells of all manner and species like the platypus that confounded the naturalists of the day.
The collection of butterflies was all the rage in the Victorian era. With bicycle and train, the average person could take off for the county and armed with a net, a killing jar and some pins, return with a box of mounted butterflies. In the mid 19th century there were some 3,000 avid butterfly collectors in England alone.
In recent times, a stigma has become attached to those who would collect and kill butterflies. The collecting and killing of butterflies is not illegal, with the exception of a selection of protected and endangered species whose numbers in the wild are already concerning low. Butterfly collection in the past seems to have played no significant role in the declines of butterfly populations, rather habitat loss is often cited as the cause.
Today, butterfly collecting is more often done in the form of photographs taken by butterfly enthusiasts who scour empty urban lots and virgin forest for the chance to site and digitally capture the beauty of a butterfly. For those who would still collect mounted butterflies, specimens are readily available from butterfly farms around the world rather than collected from the wild.

Great Collectors and Huge Collections

Walter Rothschild, the brother of Charles Rothschild, obsessively collected more  than two million butterfly specimens before his death in 1937, nearly bankrupting his family. His collection forms a significant portion of the largest butterfly collection in the world, housed at the Natural History Museum in London. This amazing collection is still yielding new information on butterflies and moths and new species are still being found within the collection. Walter’s younger brother Charles Rothschild gifted his entire butterfly collection of 3,500 specimens to his alma mater, the Harrow School in 1900.
Dr. William and Nadine McGuire donated their collection of some two million butterflies specimens to the Florida Museum of Natural History. The donation of this collection brings the number of butterflies in the museum’s collection to about nine million. The butterfly collection at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity is now considered the second largest in the world.
The U.S. National Entomological Collection houses some four million specimens of Lepidoptera from around the world.

Read More

Read more about collections, collectors and cabinets of curiosities:

• Albertus Seba Cabinet of Natural Curiosities by Irmgard Müsch, Jes Rust and Rainer Willmann
• The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth by Richard Conniff
• Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey
• Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums by Stephen T. Asma
• Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology by Lawrence Weschler
• The Dangerous World of Butterflies: The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists by Peter Laufer
• The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and Their Collectors by Michael A. Salmon
• Winged Obsession: The Pursuit of the World's Most Notorious Butterfly Smuggler by Jessica Speart