Flights of fancy

Capturing images of British butterflies dancing through the air like petals on the breeze has been a labour of love for photographer Andrew Fusek Peters, as he tells Ben Lerwill

- Ben Lerwill

NOTHING encapsulates the beauty and fragility of our native wildlife more vividly than our butterflies. They dance through the British spring and summer like petals on the breeze, silent, bright and exquisite. For Shropshire-based wildlife and landscape photographer Andrew Fusek Peters, each one is a miracle. ‘I love their elegance and aerial eloquence, as well as their symbolism and their hope,’ he rhapsodises. ‘They are phenomenal.’

This enthusiasm is thrillingly showcased in Mr Fusek Peters’s new book, Butterfly Safari, which charts his five-year journey to capture images of all 58 of our native species. The timescale involved tells its own tale as to the rarity of many of these butterflies, some of whose flight sequences are photographed here for the first time. Familiar garden visitors share the pages with far scarcer insects, their colours glimmering and their features often shown in ultra-close-up detail. If you’ve never marvelled at the intricate mosaic of scales that is the wing of a marsh fritillary or been able to trace the individual body hairs of a speckled wood, you’re in for a lepidopterous treat.

Almost all butterfly species live for mere months, sometimes only weeks, and the book makes for an absorbing guide to this ephemeral world. Mr Fusek Peters’s story, however, is not a routine one. ‘I grew up in north London. Then, in the 1970s, when I was eight or nine, I was sent away to a school on the edge of the city,’ he recalls. ‘It was a place of great cruelty and bullying, but it was also where I started to understand that Nature could be healing. If you woke up for a midnight feast, you could walk across the fields and be in the countryside.’