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Wild Side: Butterflies display colors of summer ...
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Complete article at following: http://www.riverfallsjournal.com/event/article/id/95777/
Wild Side: Butterflies display colors of summer
By: Dan Wilcox, outdoor columnist, River Falls Journal
The late novelist Vladimir Nabokov grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, in a family of wealthy aristocrats and intellectuals. Nabokov took an early interest in his father’s butterfly collection that grew into a life-long passion for butterflies.
Nabokov’s family fled to France to escape the Bolshevik revolution and he moved to the United States in the 1940s. He became a professor of Russian literature at Wellesley College and a research fellow in zoology and curator of the butterfly collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.
Nabokov never learned to drive a car. His wife Vera drove him on butterfly collecting expeditions out west. He was the first to describe the Karner Blue, a gem of a little blue butterfly that lives on wild lupine. The Karner Blue today is a federally-listed endangered species, but it has a stronghold in Wisconsin.
Like Nabokov, I developed an early childhood fascination with butterflies. Their variety, seemingly fragile structure, brilliant colors and flights over flowers had me chasing them through fields and woods in the summer. My collection grew to include most of the butterflies that lived in northern Ohio.
Many of the same species of butterflies that I came to know near my childhood home in Ohio live here in western Wisconsin. The abundant rain that we’ve had so far this year has encouraged lush growth of crops and flowering wild plants. On a walk last weekend through our planted prairie, purple prairie clover, bergamot, purple and yellow coneflowers and milkweed were blooming and covered with butterflies.
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Enjoy the flying displays of summer color.
Please send any comments and suggestions for this column to me at
wildside@rivertowns.net
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