The Butterfly Season - On Beginnings, Endings, and the Life in Between Author: Lea Korsgaard, tr. Sherilyn Nicolette HellbergISBN-13: 9780241810521Publisher: Particular Books Guideline Price: £24Nabokov said that if he had to give up writing or finding butterflies writing would have to go. Churchill built a breeding house for his butterflies. They’re in Van Gogh’s art, in Dali’s, in Hirst’s. The Victorians were keen lepidopterists and their albums of gorgeous but dead butterflies are signifiers in many a novel.For no reason she can name – she is no lepidopterist – Danish journalist Lea Korsgaard catches the bug and makes a new year resolution – to track down all the 65 native species of butterfly in a single summer. In March she sets out on her safari across the homely terrain of fields and ditches around her home and finds her first, a small tortoiseshell. She is filled with a joy that her daily life rarely offers.Modern ecologically aware lepidopterists creep up on their prey, usually to be found sitting on a flower, only to photograph it. Their satisfaction is the seeing and then the logging of the find on the nature portal to be admired by other enthusiasts. Logging a sighting’s precise location is vital as the range of the scarcer species can be tiny. A butterfly type can be confined to one field, even one hedgerow. The brown argus is found on a dune that is home to the bloody crane’s bill, the plant on which its life depends and which itself is facing extinction. The dune is thirty yards from the kiosk where for years Korsgaard has been buying ices, oblivious of the insect’s existence and its imperilment. The thought “made me cold inside”.As the summer advances and her count grows so does her obsession. She’s immersed in the butterfly’s grand mythology, in its symbology of transformation and rebirth, and in the lepidopterist community. In Lolland, Emil, a conservationist, leads her to the “picky” butterfly dependent on the bugleherb and the violet, the all but extinct pearl-bordered fritillary. Not as lucky though with the marsh fritillary and the blue mazarine, technically Korsgaard’s project ends in failure. Actually, with her new capacity for attentiveness it’s a win. And a beginning. Anne Haverty is a novelist and poet