New Zealand's Coppers, Firbank's Plaque

 I have many fond memories of Wellington (a city I'll probably never see again, as daughter and family are leaving New Zealand for Canada), and among them are, of course, some butterfly memories: of Monarchs and Yellow Admirals and, at the less spectacular end of the scale, Common Coppers. I remember the first thrill of discovering that there was a thriving colony of these little beauties living among the Wire Vines on the land between the New World supermarket and Te Papa museum. I wrote about this happy discovery at the time, and about the fact that there might be as many as 25 other New Zealand Copper species yet to be identified. And today I discover from the new issue of Butterfly magazine that a research project is under way in New Zealand – the Butterfly Discovery Project – whose first mission will be, yes, to identify new species of Copper. 
  Apparently the reason so many Coppers have remained unidentified has its origins in Cook's Endeavour voyage, from which the first collected specimens were brought back to England – and promptly sold to a trader. No original specimen has ever been located, and all that survives is a 1775 painting in William Jones's Icones. From this image (in scientific terms, an iconotype) the great naturalist Fabricius concluded that there was but one species of New Zealand Copper, Lycaena salustius. Well, since then the number has swollen to four, and, thanks to the Butterfly Discovery Project, it looks set to grow considerable larger. As a result, New Zealand, with its poor tally of butterfly species (26 listed in Wikipedia), might end up with a number not far short of the UK's 60ish. 

Talking of butterflies, I was pleased to learn, from a piece by Alan Hollinghurst in the Spectator, that Ronald Firbank now has a Blue Plaque in London, on a house on Curzon Street, where the compulsively peripatetic author roosted for a couple of years with his mother and sister. Hollinghurst is a huge fan of Firbank, and his Spectator piece rightly stresses his importance as an influence – on Evelyn Waugh, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Muriel Spark, Joe Orton, Noel Coward, even Henry Green. He deserves to be recognised as a more than a 'queer icon', though he will always be a cult writer, read by few. I've always had a soft spot for Firbank myself: indeed, when going through some of my old papers recently, I found my undergrad dissertation on him (and it wasn't as bad as I expected it to be). I'm glad he has a plaque; his final resting place is 'far away from his country'.