Elegy for butterflies

I had a brief moment of what my husband calls life’s little pleasures as I was out walking this morning. I saw a butterfly! Did I hear you say “so what’s great about that?” Well, when was the last time you saw one? Have you not been paying much attention? And no, it has very little to do with my location. I happen to live away from a bustling city centre. I am surrounded by trees, forests, golf courses and beautifully manicured gardens blooming with eye-popping flowers.

I walked all spring and saw no butterflies. Summer is peaking and I finally spotted one. It gladdened my heart but also set me thinking if my grandchildren would ever get to know what the real things are like or depend on the pinned-onto-cardboard carcasses in science labs. A day might come when we start building museums for butterflies and other small animals that are fast disappearing.

O the joy I had as a child chasing butterflies and noting their varied colours, spots and markings. I remember my father showing me how to treat them by catching one himself and illustrating how those beautiful wings crumble when handled with heavy hands. I always associate my childhood with butterflies. In the 70s, I could look out of the windows of my Bedfordshire home and watch them fluttering over the flower beds for hours and wondering how far they travelled to get to my garden. When I moved to Saudi Arabia, I still indulged in butterfly gazing with special fondness for the Al-Hassa swallowtail with its striking black and yellow wings and body. They had some butterflies on postage stamps. I wonder if it is still the same.

In elementary school, I learnt that like honey bees, butterflies pollinate plants. Will my grandchildren be taught the same at schools - what with us destroying their habitats and using toxic pesticides and herbicides in our fields and gardens? With us growing genetically modified plants that contain a bacterium toxic to insects, causing migrating flies that land on fields of these plants to get annihilated? I doubt it.

Did you ever get to watch the cartoon, ‘Hoppity Goes to Town’ when you were little? My children did. It described the return of Hoppity (a grasshopper) to a city in America, having been away for some time, only to find that his insect friends were under threat by the ‘human ones’. I remember the part where the poor insects were running from being trampled by human feet and shouting “the human ones are coming, the human ones are coming!” Have you ever wondered what some of these small inhabitants of the earth would be saying if they could talk? Or maybe they do but we are too busy to hear!

I'm no tree-hugging conservationist but still need to pay attention to some of God’s creations that help to make this earth fun to be in. Today it is the butterfly, tomorrow the bees, which are also disappearing. They might be small but they have their own jobs to do in the grand scheme of life. Or perhaps we should stop procreating and start pollinating? After all, a third of food produced for us humans is dependent on pollinators.

The last two lines of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy written in a country churchyard’ come to my mind:
“But thro' the cool sequester'd Vale of Life
Pursue the silent Tenour of thy Doom.”

Look around you after reading this and prove me wrong. It's our call.