Searching for Butterflies, BBC Radio 4
One day last week, a large white butterfly floated across our kitchen window.
We were entranced because it has not been a summer of butterflies. Once, we scarcely glanced at a cabbage white; now they are strangers drifting into town.
We have coaxed them into our garden with damask roses, blousy paeonies and brash yellow daisies in full bloom.
But still, we have seen very few.
Even the most common – large and small whites, peacocks and meadow browns – are strangers.
So lepidopterists (yes, it sounds like a nasty disease but it’s not) of the world unite – the Big Butterfly Count is upon us and has been widely declared on the radio. Join it now.
If you want to enjoy the true magic of butterflies then Mudar Salimeh is a gentle guide.
In Searching for Butterflies, Mudar – a geologist, artist and nature lover – takes us with him through the mountains of Latakia in Syria.
In the aftermath of civil war, he travels through places where someone has been lost in every home. He paints scenes of empty houses and untended crops.
War and an earthquake have affected not only human beings but nature.
Mudar is an artist. In spring 2018, he found caterpillars in his studio - there were about 1,000, he thought – and they turned into a cloud of white butterflies that enthalled him and changed his life.
Now he dares war and climbs high mountains to create an encyclopaedia of the butterflies of western Syria.
He has learned to walk very slowly in this quest.
Mudar’s story is a meditation on war and destruction – not only of people but of nature: whole forests burned down. “They burned all the country.” But in the darkness, he coaxes a butterfly onto his finger, there is hope
“Don’t make the other see you, you have to see the other,” he explains.
“There are no birds, no wind... how strange.”
In the middle of his strange quiet adventures, his mobile rings – it disturbs him and us as we listen.
He tells the story of how, in 2018, he found an enormous cloud of butterflies.
He started to take photos and then he saw a huge butterfly. Was it real or a dream?
“You think it is just a dream, later you realise it was not a dream, it was true.”
Mudar’s story is a meditation on war and destruction – not only of people but of nature: whole forests burned down.
“They burned all the country.”
But in the darkness, he coaxes a butterfly onto his finger, there is hope. His is a magical story from Falling Tree productions.
