My Account
Rob Herd shudders when he remembers his first experience with butterflies, which involved using one for target practice with a pellet gun. His seven-year-old aim was true and the pellet shattered the little blue butterfly. In the years that followed, the Red Beach resident’s enthusiasm for spreading the word about the importance of butterflies has long since outweighed this childhood misdemeanour. Rob has even had a butterfly named after him in recognition of his work collecting, cataloguing and photographing butterflies. He spoke to Terry Moore about his lifetime fascination with these beautiful creatures.
I first became interested in butterflies when I was seven years old and living in Oman in the Persian Gulf. My dad had some British friends in Oman who collected butterflies, but, strangely enough, kept only the wings. They showed me their collections and I ended up going out on collecting trips with them. We would find some pretty impressive butterflies, including large, spectacular Papilios, in wild desert places. My first collection was very amateurish, but it was enough to get me hooked. Collecting exotic butterfly species was relatively easy for me as I was in the very privileged position of travelling the world a lot as a child. My father is a Kiwi who worked for Shell Oil. I lived in Oman from the age of six until 13, and then went to boarding school at Kings College in Otahuhu, travelling overseas to stay with my family, wherever they happened to be, in the school holidays. This included visits to Brunei, Borneo, Sabah and Nigeria. In Nigeria I began collecting a bit more seriously, as it is one of the richest places in the world for butterflies. However, we had to live in a compound surrounded by barbed wire and it was unsafe to leave, so collecting opportunities there were rare, which was incredibly frustrating.
The obsession really took hold when I lived in Brunei in 1983, doing practical work towards a horticulture degree at Lincoln University. Five days a week I went to a horticultural property to study their growing methods for a couple of hours, then I would go into the bush and collect, pin and identify butterflies for the rest of the day – and often into the evening. I discovered how to trap butterflies using rotting fish and pineapple and how to mount them properly. I collected like mad; after all, I had use of my parents’ car and was living in a small country, filled with butterflies. There is a huge range of habitats there, from open plains and swamps to tropical forests. While I was there I met Alan Casssidy, an RAF pilot whose hobby was recording Brunei’s butterflies. We did a lot of collecting trips together, including one where he organised a helicopter to take us both to Pagon Ridge, 1676 metres above sea level. One day he said he was interested in a particular female butterfly in my collection and when I caught a male of the same species, he checked it with records in the UK. It turned out to be a new subspecies – no females had ever been found, and only two males. It’s only as big as your thumb, and Alan named it after me –Deramas jasoda herdi. I collected over 200 types of tropical butterflies in Brunei, and I left that collection with Brunei’s Natural History Museum. Since then I have moved on to photographing butterflies, rather than trapping and collecting them.
I took a break from butterflies for a few years after completing my horticultural diploma and a BSc in biology, and worked as a groundsman at Pinehurst School in Albany. Looking back, I can see I was stuck in a rut and tried a lot of different avenues out of it, including taking up dance, bee keeping, classical guitar, ice skating and tramping. The only butterfly-related thing I did during that time was putting together a huge collection of New Zealand moths, but then I sold it all. I was looking for a career path, and nothing interested me as much as butterflies. The best thing that came from all that searching was that I married my dance partner, Annarah, in 2005. She shares my interest in butterflies and gave me some ideas how to move forward using my specialised skills and knowledge. I started by working at Matakana Country Park, converting an old servery into a butterfly house. That really got my passion for butterflies started up again. To help stock the butterfly house, I was given a big planting of stinging nettles by a local herbalist. To my delight, I found it was covered with dozens of Yellow Admiral caterpillars, and that is how I began to breed Yellow Admirals. Unfortunately the Matakana project eventually fell apart because of the cost, but I brought the Yellow Admirals with me to my home in Red Beach. I breed them here and keep them in a small shade house until they’re ready to release.
Butterflies are ecologically important because they provide food for lizards, birds and frogs. They are also excellent pollinators, on a par with bees. The wings are fascinating, made up of microscopic scales that in some butterflies absorb ultraviolet light and then re-emit it in the same way as a light-emitting diode (LED). In most butterflies the wings fade, which is why butterfly collections have to be kept out of the light. Some don’t fade though, and are even used for jewellery. A lot of butterflies only live a few months, depending on when in the season they are born. In temperate climates, such as here in New Zealand, the last ones to hatch overwinter to continue the cycle the following year, whereas in tropical countries the cycle of egg, larva (caterpillar), pupa (chrysalis) and adult continues all year round. Populations of several species of butterfly, including Red Admirals, are threatened by German wasps and Asian paper wasps. Helms forest ringlets are also believed to be under threat but more studies of the populations need to be done.
To introduce butterflies into your garden you have to provide not only food plants for the caterpillars but also nectar plants for the butterflies. Many butterflies, such as native coppers, have a small range of only about 50 metres and so a self-sustaining population of these types can be built up in quite a small area if you have the right plants. I’m talking to Forest & Bird and the Shakespear Open Sanctuary Society about the possibility of introducing populations locally. This summer my project is to collect as many native copper butterflies as I can and put them in my butterfly house with their food plants, to breed. I am also designing and building a kitset mini-butterfly breeding house and aim to sell these, complete with eggs, so people can get these copper butterflies back into their gardens. I am also hoping to find a spot to set up a NZ butterfly and insect house locally, and am talking to Rodney District Council about that. There are about 12 native and half a dozen exotic butterflies that self-introduced from Australia (including Yellow Admirals), as well as day flying moths that could be included to make it interesting for the public.
