NOTHING encapsulates the beauty and fragility of our native wildlife more vividly than our butterflies. They dance through the British spring and summer like petals on the breeze, silent, bright and exquisite. For Shropshire-based wildlife and landscape photographer Andrew Fusek Peters, each one is a miracle. ‘I love their elegance and aerial eloquence, as well as their symbolism and their hope,’ he rhapsodises. ‘They are phenomenal.’
This enthusiasm is thrillingly showcased in Mr Fusek Peters’s new book, Butterfly Safari, which charts his five-year journey to capture images of all 58 of our native species. The timescale involved tells its own tale as to the rarity of many of these butterflies, some of whose flight sequences are photographed here for the first time. Familiar garden visitors share the pages with far scarcer insects, their colours glimmering and their features often shown in ultra-close-up detail. If you’ve never marvelled at the intricate mosaic of scales that is the wing of a marsh fritillary or been able to trace the individual body hairs of a speckled wood, you’re in for a lepidopterous treat.
Almost all butterfly species live for mere months, sometimes only weeks, and the book makes for an absorbing guide to this ephemeral world. Mr Fusek Peters’s story, however, is not a routine one. ‘I grew up in north London. Then, in the 1970s, when I was eight or nine, I was sent away to a school on the edge of the city,’ he recalls. ‘It was a place of great cruelty and bullying, but it was also where I started to understand that Nature could be healing. If you woke up for a midnight feast, you could walk across the fields and be in the countryside.’
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة June 21, 2023 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة June 21, 2023 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Happiness in small things
Putting life into perspective and forces of nature in farming
Colour vision
In an eye-baffling arrangement of geometric shapes, a sinister-looking clown and a little girl, Test Card F is one of television’s most enduring images, says Rob Crossan
'Without fever there is no creation'
Three of the top 10 operas performed worldwide are by the emotionally volatile Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who died a century ago. Henrietta Bredin explains how his colourful life influenced his melodramatic plot lines
The colour revolution
Toxic, dull or fast-fading pigments had long made it tricky for artists to paint verdant scenes, but the 19th century ushered in a viridescent explosion of waterlili
Bullace for you
The distinction between plums, damsons and bullaces is sweetly subtle, boiling down to flavour and aesthetics, but don’t eat the stones, warns John Wright
Lights, camera, action!
Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary
I was on fire for you, where did you go?
In Iceland, a land with no monks or monkeys, our correspondent attempts to master the art of fishing light’ for Salmo salar, by stroking the creases and dimples of the Midfjardara river like the features of a loved one
Bravery bevond belief
A teenager on his gap year who saved a boy and his father from being savaged by a crocodile is one of a host of heroic acts celebrated in a book to mark the 250th anniversary of the Royal Humane Society, says its author Rupert Uloth
Let's get to the bottom of this
Discovering a well on your property can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, but all's well that ends well, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as she examines the benefits of a personal water supply
Sing on, sweet bird
An essential component of our emotional relationship with the landscape, the mellifluous song of a thrush shapes the very foundation of human happiness, notes Mark Cocker, as he takes a closer look at this diverse family of birds