Blame the Enlightenment for species extinction
As if she hadn’t got enough on her plate already, the high-powered Danish journalist and mother of three Lea Korsgaard decides to track down all Danish butterfly species in a single summer. She knows nothing about butterflies, claims to be unsure about what has sparked her unusual ambition and sets about learning a new language – of nature, lepidoptera and obsession – with a disarming lack of expertise. The nature-quest narrative is an eccentric but surprisingly well-populated subgenre of nature writing. Midway through my own journey to find all British butterfly species in one year, I was devastated to discover that there was an earlier book on the same undertaking by Robin Page.
