Why are butterflies called butterflies? Dr Johnson thought it was because they first appear ‘in the beginning of the season for butter’. The charming entry for ‘Butterfly’ in his dictionary provides an explanation as good as any – and better than some. It was once believed that witches take the form of butterflies and steal milk and butter. It’s even been claimed that butterflies are named for their excrement, which resembles butter. As butterflies don’t excrete anything, that theory can be ruled out. It’s more likely that the name originates in the fact that butter-yellow brimstones are often the first butterflies to be seen in spring. 

I have been exploring this question, among much else, in the course of writing a book, The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment, which, after a long pupation, has now been published. Here is another question: why are there so few butterflies in the works of Shakespeare? Their scarcity seems odd, given how alive to nature he was – his work teems with animal and bird life, and he wrote the finest flower poetry in the English language too. The answer is that Shakespeare lived at a time when there had been no real attempt to distinguish between different species of butterflies: a butterfly was a butterfly, a frivolous creature, and that was that. 

It wasn’t until the 18th century that people woke up to the variety of butter­flies and began to study them systematically. The first group to take a serious interest in them was the Society of Aurelians, which met in a tavern in Exchange Alley until it was destroyed in a