'They Tasted Like Almonds'

“‘When I was younger I ate some butterflies in Vermont to see if they were poisonous,’ he said as his wife hovered over the cold-cuts counter. ‘I didn’t see any difference between a Monarch butterfly and a Viceroy. The taste of both was vile, but I had no ill effects. They tasted like almonds and perhaps a green cheese combination. I ate them raw. I held one in one hot little hand and one in the other. Will you eat some with me tomorrow for breakfast?’”

When I collected butterflies as a boy I performed the identical lepidopteran experiment (on the head, thorax and abdomen, not the wings). The field guides told me viceroys had co-evolved to resemble monarchs, a phenomenon known as Müllerian mimicry. The strategy is simple: If birds learn that a certain species of butterfly tastes foul, they are likelier to avoid similar-looking prey. The mimicry is cunning enough to fool careless humans. Thursday afternoon I saw a monarch flitting about the flowerless crepe myrtle in our backyard. Monarchs are slightly larger than viceroys and have a broader black band around the edge of their upper wings. The overall black-to-orange ratio is higher on the wings of monarchs. In memory I can re-taste the crunchy bitterness of both. Out of curiosity I once chewed and swallowed a firefly and recall it as even more bitter though less crunchy than either butterfly.

The day before I had spoken with a friend in Schenectady, N.Y., where two inches of snow had fallen. Seeing a butterfly always triggers a small explosion of wonder. Seeing one when winter still reigns in another part of the country is an unbidden gift. The lepidopterist speaking above, of course, is Vladimir Nabokov. The monarch/viceroy pairing shows up again in his Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). Van Veen notes “some accursed insect” on a nearby aspen trunk. Ada, an amateur lepidopterist, writes in editorial parentheses:

“(Accursed? Accursed? It was the newly described, fantastically rare vanessian, Nymphalis danaus Nab., orange-brown, with black-and-white foretips, mimicking, as its discoverer Professor Nabonidus of Babylon College, Nebraska, realized, not the Monarch butterfly directly, but the Monarch through the Viceroy, one of the Monarch's best known imitators. In Ada’s angry hand.)”

[The passage quoted at the top comes from an article by Robert H. Boyle, “An Absence of Wood Nymphs,” published in the Sept. 14, 1959 issue of Sports Illustrated. It is excerpted in Nabokov’s Butterflies: Published and Uncollected Writings (eds. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, 2000) and published in full in Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov (ed. Robert Golla, 2017).]