One Butterfly Turned Me to Biology, Another One Helped Establish Metapopulation Ecology

Abstract

In the 1950s and the 1960s, when I was a boy, it was common in Finland for children to spend school holidays at the countryside, in one’s grandparents’ place. I was no exception. My father had left his small village on the coast of the Gulf of Finland following the war, to settle down, with my mother, in the town of Tampere some 300 km away. Starting from the age of 4 months and until I had completed high school, I spent all my summers in my father’s home village, in my grandmother’s little house, with my brother and, during their vacations, with my parents. I and my brother had plenty of company, there were a dozen other boys and girls with comparable family histories, and local children as well. We had a wonderful childhood, complete freedom, to play whatever we pleased, to swim and to fish, and to spend all our time out of doors. In around 1961, one older boy started to collect butterflies and moths, and a few others followed suit, me included. We made our own butterfly nets and boxes for specimens, we stalked hawk moths in lilac flowers during the light summer nights, we searched for big caterpillars to rear big moths. For the others this lasted for two summers, but I never stopped. I suppose I was not a super social kid, I was happy to wander around on my own.