In Pursuit of Butterflies: A Fifty-Year Affair

Matthew Oates has led a butterflying life. Naturalist, conservationist and passionate lover of poetry, he has devoted himself 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.

Oates leads the reader through a lifetime of butterflying, across the mountain tops, the peat bogs, sea cliffs, meadows, heaths, the chalk downs and great forests of the British Isles. Full of humour, zeal, digression, expertise and anecdote, In Pursuit of Butterflies provides a profound encounter with one of our great butterfly lovers, and with a half-century of butterflies in Britain.

Softback, 496 pp., 16 colour plates

M. Oates, Bloomsbury, 2016