Butterflies

I popped into see our entomologist today. He's fab and fascinating and has brilliant stories about growing up in Brazil and collecting insects as a child... he would come home from school and go straight into the jungle which surrounded their house to explore and admire the wildlife... it's a really different world...

To add to this he was showing me some of the beautiful butterflies in the collections... These ones are are from papua new guinea and were most likely collected in the eighteen hundreds, they're now Cites protected, so you're not allowed to go nabbing them from the wilderness anymore...

I liked this shot because the pin looks fearsome and although beautiful the butterfly looks wounded, (see it large for the full gore) so it's got that strange mix of wonder and guilt that I always find interesting about entomology collections...