In 2022, journalist Lea Korsgaard set out to see all 64 of Denmark's butterfly species within a year. The Butterfly Season, her first book available in English, translated from Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, is an engaging record of that quest and a profound meditation on metamorphosis, extinction, and connection with nature.
While waiting for butterflies to emerge, Korsgaard passed the winter studying field guides and raising painted ladies indoors, from eggs to caterpillars to chrysalises. So unpromising did they appear throughout the process that it's no wonder Aristotle assumed eggs were lifeless and adult butterflies generated spontaneously. Various philosophers and theologians followed in his footsteps by arguing that all creatures--including humans--evolve toward perfection.
Compared to other year-challenge books, The Butterfly Season is heavier on historical research and philosophical reflection than the practicalities of the journey. Korsgaard considers the Freudian--that is, sexual--explanation for obsessive collecting by the likes of Vladimir Nabokov. She also delves into the cultural significance of butterflies, which are often associated with spirits and eternal life. Indeed, Korsgaard's mother attributes glimpses of small tortoiseshells in significant moments to the continued presence of her late mother.
The author's first sighting of the season was a small tortoiseshell on March 7. For expert advice and in-the-field guidance, she consulted lepidopterist Michael Stoltze and precocious biology student Emil Blicher Bjerregård. The latter works on restoring butterfly habitats and helped Korsgaard group her list into 12 trips. Butterflies rely on specific locales, such as bogs or heath, where trees are thin and food plants abundant. She had a breathtaking view of a northern chequered skipper pair; once common, they'll be locally extinct in a year, according to Bjerregård.
Korsgaard is distressed that few are sounding the alarm over how capitalism and consumerism threaten biodiversity. Her realistic yet melancholy tone risks alienating readers who signed up for lighthearted butterfly-watching japes. However, her prose is lush with lyrical descriptions of landscapes and epiphanies experienced in them. Each chapter ends with a list of the species seen, accompanied by color sketches.
By summer's end, with several species unseen, Korsgaard feared her project was doomed. Yet it had become more than checking butterflies off a list. Instead, she was recapturing the holistic relationship with nature modeled by members of her family--such as her grandfather, the novelist, Lutheran minister, and ethnographer Erik Aalbæk Jensen, whose diaries evinced his love of wild places and creatures. This allowed her to genuinely affirm, "This was not the end; this had only just begun." By turns pessimistic and mystical, The Butterfly Season is a nature book for the age of extinctions. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck
Shelf Talker: Danish journalist Lea Korsgaard undertakes to see all 64 of the country's butterfly species in a year and turns the resulting journey into a philosophical rumination on change, loss, and wonder.