Talking of Butterflies...

The heatwave continuing, I strolled down earlier today to the local Ecology Centre, that little corner of Paradise that I've mentioned before in passing. The change in the weather has had dramatic effects: the air was alive with Ringlets and Gatekeepers, Meadow Browns and Skippers (Small) - to name only the most numerous - all flying in such profusion as I haven't seen in years. The miraculous effects of sunny summer weather - at last! If this keeps going, who knows what we might yet see? In the meanwhile, today's butterflies were losing no time, setting about creating the next generation while the sun shone (as were the electric-blue Damsel Flies)...
   Talking of butterflies, here's that great butterfly lover (and significant lepidopterist) Vladimir Nabokov talking - or rather, writing, for his contributions to 'interviews' were always written - about the inadequacy of literary language, even his, in describing them, and giving his own startling perspective on the matter:
'In itself, an aurelian's passion is not a particularly unusual sickness; but it stands outside the limits of a novelist's world, and I can prove this by the fact that whenever I allude to butterflies in my novels, no matter how diligently I rework the stuff, it remains pale and false and does not really express what I want it to express-- what, indeed, it can only express in the special scientific terms of my entomological papers. The butterfly that lives forever on its type-labeled pin and in its O. D. ("original description") in a scientific journal dies a messy death in the fumes of the arty gush. However-- not to let your question go completely unanswered-- 1 must admit that in one sense the entomological satellite does impinge upon my novelistic globe. This is when certain place-names are mentioned. Thus if I hear or read the words "Alp Grum, Engadine" the normal observer within me may force me to imagine the belvedere of a tiny hotel on its 2000-meter-tall perch and mowers working along a path that winds down to a toy railway; but what I see first of all and above all is the Yellow-banded Ringlet settled with folded wings on the flower that those damned scythes are about to behead.'
(The Ringlet in the picture is our own Ringlet, not the Yellow-banded, a species of the high Alps.)