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Four Wings and a Prayer by Sue Halpern, Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Pantheon,
£12.99, ISBN 0297842218

IN BLACKER moments, agonising about the often childish preoccupations of
science with novelty and rarity, I like to think of mice, robins and cabbage
butterflies to remind myself how many fellow biologists (even lepidopterists)
can stay in love with the common, the ordinary, the seemingly well known. As Sam
Berry, David Lack and Miriam Rothschild all showed, there is nothing mundane
about any of these creatures.

This delightful book is about a heterogeneous group of biophiles, linked by
their lifelong obsession with one of the most common and widespread butterflies
on Earth—the monarch —and its annual journey from Canada to Mexico
and back. All the main North American proponents are here, including Fred
Urquhart, Lincoln Brower, Sandra Perez, and many many others. Having been only
dimly aware of the alliances and discords among them, I learned much about the
human dimensions of the 50-year unfolding drama of the North American
monarch.

Four Wings and a Prayer is US-centric. Excellent studies on the monarch in
Australia, which it invaded around 1870, reveal rather different patterns of
behaviour. There’s no mention of this nor of the non-migratory races of Latin
America. A section on white monarchs in Hawaii conveys the idea that this
recessive mutant is unique to that far-flung US outpost, when it also occurs in
New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, and even North America.

If you want to know about monarch butterfly biology, this is not the book for
you. But it isn’t meant to be a biology book: it’s about how a familiar species
can continue to excite, challenge and enthral. This outstanding piece of
narrative sociology is essential reading for monarch-fancier fanciers—and
anyone curious about how natural history really gets done.