Lepidopterist Sheds New Light On Austria’s Rare Butterflies provides a bittersweet image of butterflies “exhausted from nocturnal fluttering” under artifical lights:
Gerhard Tarmann will never forget when the 1964 Winter Olympics came here. Not because of the gold medals his ski-crazy nation won in the men’s downhill and slalom, but because of the devastation it wreaked on the city’s butterflies.Then a 14-year-old amateur lepidopterist, he at first thought the games were a godsend. To move masses of spectators to the slopes, the city built a bridge over the river Inn. In the summer, the bridge’s lighted sidewalks, shining all night long, lured swarms of butterflies, which are active in daylight, from the dark, tree-lined banks below.
“They’d land on the sidewalk, thousands of them. You just picked them up with your fingers,” Dr. Tarmann said recently from the middle of Innsbruck’s Olympic Bridge, tweezing the wintry air with a forefinger and a thumb as cars roared past. “I’d walk up one side,” he explained, with a wave of his hand, “and back the other — for hours.”
But within just three years, the butterflies had all but disappeared, burned by the walkway’s hot, white lights or so exhausted from all that nocturnal fluttering that they couldn’t lay eggs or find food.
By the way, “lepidopterist” is a very cool word.