In Pursuit of Butterflies: A 50 Year Affair

Matthew Oates has led a butterflying life. Naturalist and conservationist, and passionate lover of poetry, he has devoted himself entirely to these exalted creatures: to their observation, to singing their praises and to ensuring their survival. Based on fifty years of detailed diaries, In Pursuit of Butterflies is the chronicle of this life. From his childhood in East Hampshire – the heartland of Gilbert White of Selborne, the father of natural history, and of the poet Edward Thomas – in these pages Oates leads the reader through a lifetime of butterflying and across the mountain tops, peat bogs, sea cliffs, meadows, heaths, chalk downs and great forests of Great Britain and Ireland. Full of humour, zeal, digression, expertise and anecdote, they offer a profound encounter with one of England’s great butterfly lovers, and with a half-century of butterflies in England.