The butterfly effect

Bottles are no place for the winged beauties as they are born free

Summers take me back to a nostalgic summer afternoon in New York, where I lived when I was a young girl of 8 years. As a pastime, I would go on forays to huge, spacious meadows on a butterfly-catching spree. The mellowed, balmy breeze played havoc with my hair, yet the air had a nip in it to energise even the most lethargic of people. The weeds scratched our bare legs, while the wild flowers in pink, orange, and yellow helped camouflage the butterflies subtly.

Our spirits never got dampened, nor did we find this exciting sport of catching the mischievous butterflies hackneyed. On the other hand, waving our huge butterfly nets made us feel positively refreshed, for it set our adrenalin pumping and our senses all alert like radar.

Like Alexander the Great, we had to be the ultimate conquerors and outwit those survival-of-the-fittest butterflies. So, we used to swoop down on them with our huge, billowy butterfly nets and catch them unawares!

After they were caught, we transferred them to bottles that had holes in the lids so that the butterflies were not suffocated. In childish abandon, we caught these creatures, drew their structures in huge drawing books, and, finally, when they eventually died, kept their wings pressed in notebooks
for posterity.

The next year, however, when I was 9, I happened to read one of Gerald Durrell’s famous books on animals, My Friends and Other Animals, which left a deep and lasting impact on my impressionable brain. It somehow made me think through his humorous weaving of a suspenseful story about the sacredness of animals, which includes our winged beauties.

Indeed, butterflies are the beautiful creations of an omniscient God, and like all living creatures, they deserve a life that should not be cut short. Upsetting the balance in the cycle of nature causes a serious imbalance in nature. Was not the capture of them in glass bottles a restriction of their freedom and independence, and weren’t their natural rights curtailed by this inhuman bondage?

Yes, it was cruel to harm these wonderful creatures, which are both decorative and functional. Being in the prime of our youth, we had been unable to reflect and dwell on the bigger picture of nature and its cycles, which are not necessarily vicious!

As my mind was reverberating with all these thoughts of freedom, my friends came home with the spoils of butterfly-catching. In a blinding frenzy, I took the bottles boisterously away from my friends, opened the lids, and slowly let out the lovely, gorgeous butterflies! Oh, how happy they seemed to be freed from their glassy prisons!

As they flew away joyfully and soared into the distant horizon offset by the glowing embers of the setting sun, tears streamed down my face as I whispered softly, “Butterflies are born free and should therefore live free.”