The butterfly was dead when the old man found it, lying in the snow 1,600 metres above sea level. It didn’t have a name then, as he bent down and scooped its body up from the ice – a tiny John Doe, light as a feather, barely visible to an untrained eye. But this encounter in the spring of 1922 wasn’t his first brush with the short life cycle of an insect. It wasn’t his first time on Barrington Tops either, a volcanic plateau perched high in the Great Dividing Range of New South Wales. The man’s name was Johnny Hopson but to many he was known as the “Father of the Tops”.
It was no secret that the plateau was good butterfly country; if you picked your moment right, the mountain air would be thick with them, gathering at dusk in cloud-like clusters ripe for someone like Hopson to catch hundreds at a time with a sweep of a net. Or, as in this case, a cold snap or unexpected snowfall might leave the ground littered with delicate corpses, waiting in plain sight for a keen-eyed collector. The butterflies were just the start of its riches and, once word began to spread of this “nature’s wonderland”, collectors swarmed like moths to a flame.
Hopson was there to guide the first scientific expedition in 1915 and successive waves of genteel academics, wet-eared university students and avid amateurs who trudged up the misty slopes with their nets and killing jars.
Then, in June 1928, Johnny Hopson keeled over dead at the age of 60. The story of his butterfly didn’t end there. Most of the 3,000-odd insects he’d collected were bequeathed to the Australian Museum in Sydney but that little fellow from the snowfield had passed into the hands and collection of Hopson’s friend and Australia’s foremost butterfly collector, Dr Gustavus Athol Waterhouse.
View image in fullscreen Gustavus Athol Waterhouse in 1930. Photograph: Australian Museum
Finishing the work of other collectors, whether they were living or dead, friend or stranger, was nothing new for Waterhouse and he set about identifying the body. As he looked closer at its wings he saw bright-red markings on the silky white underside, telling him this was something new.
Waterhouse dubbed it Pseudalmenus chlorinda barringtonensis. Later generations of entomologists would give it a much cooler nickname – the flame hairstreak.
Nearly 90 years later, in 2016, an email pinged into the inbox of an Australian National University scientist, Dr Michael Braby, with an unusual attachment. It was a photograph of a flame hairstreak, supposedly the one Hopson found dead in the snow. Thanks to Waterhouse, that specimen had become a “holotype” – the first of its kind to be collected and named, and held by the Australian Museum since the 1930s.
View image in fullscreen The main zoological hall of the National Museum of Victoria. Photograph: State Library of Victoria
Like Waterhouse, researchers such as Braby often pick up the trail of generations of long-dead collectors whose life’s works now sit in museum drawers.
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