KARORI: A New Zealand enthusiast has spent half a century amassing one of the largest private collections of butterflies in the world. As death approached, he donated 20,000 copies of this life’s work to the museum. Wheelchair-bound and ravaged by multiple sclerosis, 68-year-old John McArthur vividly remembers the first time he saw a butterfly. He was 10 years old and a shock of yellow and black, a butterfly fluttering among the zinnias in his mother’s New York garden. “I was hooked,” says McArthur, recounting the first step of the journey that took him from the Amazon to the Himalayas, the Andes back to his native New Zealand. Over nearly 60 years, he amassed more than 20,000 specimens, a kaleidoscope of color and life, which he painstakingly pinned into the hundreds of boxes that lined the walls of his home. McArthur also remembers the last time he caught a butterfly. It was during a 2008 visit to the achingly beautiful Cobb Valley in New Zealand’s South Island. He came across a boulder copper butterfly. He quickly dropped his crutches and dropped to his knees to pick up the little miracle. Soon such an effort would be too great. By then, he already felt a tingle in his spine. Doctors diagnosed multiple sclerosis, an incurable disease of the central nervous system. “The specialist told me that by 15 I would probably need a walking stick,” McArthur recalls. “But six months after diagnosis I was in a wheelchair. The disease has now deprived McArthur of the use of his arms and legs, and his speech is labored. But his mind remains sharp, remembering the names of the specimens and the places where he found his favorite butterflies. Faced with his own mortality, McArthur set out to find thousands of beloved butterfly specimens a new home, somewhere they could find new life after his death. He ruled out donating to the New Zealand museum: “They just don’t have the equipment,” he said. “You need air conditioning, very strict pest control. It’s quite expensive to host a large collection.” Instead, he chose the Natural History Museum in London and paid for his collection to be transported from Wellington to London this April. “I had mixed feelings – sad that it was going, but absolutely thrilled that it was going where it would be useful.” His Lepidoptera were merged into the museum’s extensive collection, which contains about 13.5 million butterflies, housed in 80,000 drawers. Some of McArthur’s favorites are now preserved along with specimens studied by Charles Darwin, the 19th-century naturalist who popularized the theory of evolution. “It’s a pretty big deal for collectors. It’s humiliating,” McArthur added. The walls of the room that once housed his butterflies have now been torn down and the space converted into a laundry room. “I never went there again once they were gone. It felt like a black hole,” he said. Only a handful of butterflies remained that he could not part with. They include a box of surprisingly colorful specimens from Indonesia, orange, red, yellow, neon blue and off-white. McArthur didn’t like killing butterflies – hurting the thing he loved. “It’s never pretty” – and the best method was to crush the chest where the wings join the body – “they die instantly”. “If I enter Buddhist hell, I’m sure I’ll end up with a thousand pins through me,” he said. But the New Zealander’s eyes light up when he discusses some of the mischief his collecting has caused. As a child, he once cut open the lining of his mother’s dress to make a butterfly net. “I didn’t catch anything. The material was too stiff, but she understood my passion.” He eventually followed in his father’s footsteps and became a diplomat, allowing exploration on several continents. In the Peruvian jungle, he had a dangerous undergrowth with a bush viper – one of the most venomous snakes in the world. Even his biggest find – a white female Hypsochila – living only in the high Andes brought problems. After netting a rare specimen, he was interrogated by the Chilean police, who accused him of conspiring with smugglers. “They said whoever took me there was the shooter. The police let me go, but it was pretty close.” His husband and now carer James Hu, whom McArthur met in the 1990s when he was posted to Shanghai, became complicit in the search. Hu laughed, recalling how he once nervously watched over monks from a Buddhist temple while McArthur scoured a nearby field for Chinese peacock butterflies in the foothills of the Himalayas. If he had his time over again, McArthur said he would rather help conserve than collect butterflies. “I’d be more interested in breeding—doing anything to increase the protection of their natural habitat.”
