Adventures with Butterflies

By Harry R. Roegner

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 14, 2005
• ISBN: 9781462838806

Harry R. Roegner

With degrees from Princeton University and the University of California at Berkely, New Jersey native Harry R. Roegner has lived in France, Belgium and Germany plus traveled extensively in Asia, Africa and Latin America in his vocation as an international businessman and in his avocation as an avid butterfly enthusiast. Roegner’s ancestors were some of the fist Dutch settles to move into Lenape territory across the Hudson River form Manhattan in the 1680’s. He has amassed one of the major private collections in the country which now resides at the Cleveland Museum of natural History. In 1999, Mr. Roegner started to collect notes made during his 40 plus years of collecting which led to publishing of his first set of butterfly Adventures memoirs – Butterfly Trails. Adventures with Butterflies is his second set of memoirs with at least one more set in the planning stage. In addition to being a leading authority on the international automotive business and the butterfly, Mr. Roegner, who speaks five languages, was an advisor form 1984 to 1992 to the U.S. Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade representative on international trade policy. In 2004, Mr. Roegner published Gerrit the first of a series of biographies on person of historical note. Minnie of Hobcaw, the third book in the series, focuses on the contributions of Minnie Kennedy to our society and the major transitions of many black Americans in the 20th century form South and North and from racial stereotyping to broader acceptance.

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Copyright © 2006 by Harry Roegner.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

FRANCE—PARIS, 1968

JAMAICA—HOMERUS

TAIWAN-BUTTERFLY VALLEY

JAPAN—NARITA

BRAZIL—RONDONIA

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

END NOTES

INTRODUCTION

I had the great, good fortune to be able to spend the years between 1960 and 2002 in a fairly sustained effort to collect butterflies all over the world. My occupation as an international businessman led to living in various countries and helped to provide frequent traveler miles to get me to others … a good synergy between vocation and avocation.

What started as a fascination with the habits of butterflies in 1943, stimulated by an entomologist neighbor with a large English garden, expanded over time into a full-fledged infatuation that took me to rainforests in remote parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa. The infatuation grows as one encounters the exotic species unique to certain regions or observes the variations of the same species as they adapt to changing environmental conditions along longitudes. There are over twenty thousand identified butterfly species in the world, a number which can be multiplied several times if one thinks of sub-species and clearly distinct races. To try, as one person, to put a dent in an objective of this scale is daunting, but the enthusiast, in true Quixotic form, just plunges ahead driven by visions of actually seeing one more rare beauty flitting through the jungle.

The diversity of butterflies in an area is directly tied to the diversity of the flora which provide food for their larvae. Maximum flora diversity is found in the shrinking primary forests at the fringes of our expanding civilization. I spent a lot of time in these fringe areas, collecting butterflies and collecting memories of the people and animals which inhabit them. After forty years of clunking around, my old, beat-up knees and the latest levels of man’s violence toward nature and himself convinced me to pack it up and make an appropriate disposition of what I had collected. The butterflies collected are now at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History while memories collected are recorded in a book of memoirs recently written and based on extensive notes taken at the time the trips were taken.

For Adventures with Butterflies, I picked five memories that combined times and places of particular socio-political interest with butterflies displaying particularly interesting species behavior patterns. The memories are listed chronologically such that the reader can track where I had been and where I was going on my butterfly odyssey. Interestingly, over time, my accumulating experience with butterflies led to a growing respect for their ability to survive. This growing respect is reflected in the progressively increasing focus given to species survival tactics in my later memoirs. As an expression of this, by the 90s, I often found myself looking at a butterfly species through the eyes of their leading predator—birds: how fast and erratically do they fly? How easy are they to spot up against their natural backgrounds? How do they try to fool or scare? Do they taste good or do they have a foul taste? And is the prize worth the effort?

The first memoir is set in Paris in 1968 … the year of the Great National Strike in France. I had primarily been collecting in the U.S. and Central America up to that time. I had to take the lead in starting up a French company under very adverse circumstances. But, even so, managed to find some time to tap into the local butterflies of France and southern Belgium where I encountered the great Emperor of Europe, began an acquaintance with the butterflies of the Euro-Asian land mass and observed the effects of severe drought on butterfly behavior.

The second memoir is set on the island of Jamaica in 1975 at the time that the Manley government was forcing out whites with the support of the Rastas … descendants of the island’s natives and African slaves escaped from 16th century sugar plantations. Having moved from France to Belgium, I endeavored to spice up a typical, cold rainy Brussels winter with a family vacation to sunny Jamaica. My real objective, however, was Latin America’s largest and rarest swallowtail butterfly … Papilio Homerus, which is only found high in the mountains of that island.

In 1978, my family and I returned to the U.S. from Europe and got a chance to be reamericanized after nearly a decade overseas. We ended up in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, an eastern suburb of Cleveland, where my family did reaclimate. I, however, in a global planning and business development position continued to travel the world. Usually business trips don’t provide the best opportunities for collecting exotic butterflies but an odd assignment to southern Taiwan put me close to one of the best butterfly collecting spots in the world … Butterfly Valley in a mountainous area reserved for the local aborigines.

In the mid-80s I got a chance to spearhead, among other things, my company’s efforts to become a supplier to Japan’s increasingly powerful car manufacturers. From 1984 to 1988 I was a virtual commuter from Cleveland to Tokyo Narita Airport. In the process, I got the opportunity to collect unusual butterflies on a large strip of land adjoining Narita Airport that had been condemned by the government ten years earlier for a future airport expansion. The local Buddhist farmers on the land, however, took to guerrilla tactics to block the airport expansion leading to major confrontations but also the emergence of lovely colonies of butterflies as the land temporarily went back to its natural state.

In 2000, I was in the sixth year of running my international automotive consulting and publishing company with offices in Cleveland, Tokyo and Paris. I was still pounding around the world on automotive matters but was reaching the end of the road on my butterfly odyssey as badminton, tennis and enumerable butterfly trails finally succeeded in wearing out the cartilage in my knees. In hindsight, if I had known that cartilage was a depreciating asset, I would have been more careful in how I used it. I judged that I had only a few more serious butterfly trips left on those knees, so I picked the destinations carefully. In the western Amazon Basin is a Brazilian state called Rondonia, largely formed by cutting a huge piece of land reserved for primitive Indian trips in half, with the Indians keeping the half adjoining the Peruvian and Bolivian borders and the other half being targeted as a development area for cacao plantations. Near its main town of Caucalandia, in what is left of some old, abandoned rubber plantations, a special reserve exists in what is one of the most biologically diverse spots in the world. I was there to collect butterflies while missionaries from around the world were there to collect souls from the nearby Indian reservations.

Butterflies appeared on earth about eighty to one hundred million years ago, roughly at the same time as bees and the appearance of flowering plants. They have not changed much for some time … In the Florissant Colorado Petrified Forest in 1980, I saw a small Lycaenid butterfly fossilized in amber thirty million years old that was identical to several I had collected only two hours before in a nearby field. Butterflies’ ability to extend the dormancy periods in their metamorphic cycles for long stretches of time has enabled them to live through various extinctions. As well, enough different species tied to enough different larval food plants usually insures that some species will survive difficult periods.

In today’s world of reducing numbers of plant species in virtually all parts of the globe, many butterfly species will disappear, particularly those adapted to the dark, moist environments under the crowns of primary rainforests. of course, some butterflies will become more prevalent … particularly those that feed on plants that humans have domesticated for food such as Pireis rapae, the pesty, little white cabbage butterfly, and Colias philodice, known as the alfalfa or clover sulphur due to the love of its larvae for those field greens. Butterfly species that can migrate, such as Vanessa cardui (the painted lady) have survival advantages over species that remain in situ … cardui will travel from desert lowlands to mountain summits to grassy meadows to get a good meal of thistles, cress, wild mustard, or sunflowers for its larvae. Cardui can be found relatively unchanged world-wide and in good numbers … as in any other species, the ability to use a wide variety of larval foods and be flexible is an essential survival attribute.

As has happened for millions of years, the order Lepidoptera, which contains butterflies and moths, will doubtless continue on, absent some major world cataclysm. Many species, however, will not continue on which is a major underpinning for the efforts of people such as myself to memorialize them in museum collections and write about their lives and habitats. The butterflies cannot be fully described, however, without describing the still undeveloped, exotic areas they inhabit and the adventures encountered getting to them and getting out in one piece. For readers interested in history, adventure and moments of social transformation, these memoirs should be a source of considerable entertainment.

… My first overseas assignment gives me not only a closer acquaintance with France’s communist unions than one might desire, but also a close up view of Euro-Asian butterflies under the stress of unexpected drought.

FRANCE—PARIS, 1968

The PanAm 707’s wheels touched down at 8:00 a.m. on the main runway of Paris’ Orly airport—France’s principal airport in spring, 1968. At that time, today’s huge Charles deGaulle airport was only a concept in a transportation planner’s forward-options folder and even the name itself was probably contingent on the outcome of the dramatic events which were to unfold over the next several months.

My company’s international division had just given me the assignment to come up with a plan to convert a recently acquired French farm tractor company into a major European source point for the company’s lift truck division. It was a tough job, the most challenging element of which was developing a realistic production forecast that would guide the staffing and re-equipping of an old tractor plant at Dieppe on the English Channel. To do the job I would need smooth running air travel out of Paris to work up the European sales and marketing program plus good, open communication with the plant production people in Dieppe. Little did I know that events were conspiring to make my task well nigh impossible.

As the cab headed downtown toward my hotel, I was feeling fairly confident—several years earlier I had successfully pioneered the division’s new lift truck technologies on the U.S. West Coast, my French was in pretty good shape, and I had handled this sort of assignment several times before, though for other products. I would be in Europe most of the next month, minus several weekends back home in Milwaukee. In late May, with school over, my wife and two kids would come over and we would set up a semipermanent residence in the countryside to the northwest of Paris near the Auto Route du Nord heading out toward Dieppe.

The cab left the airport zone and passed the Hilton on the right where I recalled several pleasant dinners in the past listening to Stefan Grapelli play jazz on his violin in the glassed-in dining room on the top floor with the lights of Paris as his backdrop. Paris was truly a center of civilization—at least it seemed so at the time.

Orly Airport is to the south of Paris and in approaching the city center it was necessary to pass through some industrial areas and the western corner of the Left Bank district, long renowned for cultural and intellectual ferment. I had been told that there was growing pressure from the CGT (the National Communist Trade Union) for higher wages and improved working conditions, but I was unprepared for what I saw as we crossed the industrial area. Several plants were closed with pickets blocking the parking lots and big banners hung between trees advising workers to go home and fight for justice. Groups of workers stood around in parks and on street corners in serious discussion with arms waving, fingers pointing, and many fists clenched. one of Paris’ famous popular trees had been sawed down and lay across the driveway leading to a gear company’s headquarters building. After considerable experience with industrial action in the U.S. Middle West, I knew the signs indicating a seriously riled up labor force, but this was ominously different—management was seldom seen and occasional acts of violence against public property were in evidence. The front window of a Post office had been smashed, and a small Renault police car burned at an intersection with no one doing anything about it. Where were the police? Where was the fire department? This was clearly more than a normal industrial dispute. That the government itself might be a target in addition to local industry and that the government’s normal first line of defense (i.e., the local police and fire departments) were standing off to the side waiting to see what would happen next, were not good signs.

Closer to Paris, things seemed to return more to normal though gangs of students could be seen parading around in the streets near the university as we passed by the Left Bank district. I asked the cab driver for his opinion on all this—he was a Frenchman, about fifty years old, who dearly loved his Peugeot 404 as evidenced by its very well kept interior and the expensive oil he used on his leather-wrapped steering wheel. He shook his head and said nothing at first. Then he blurted out, I’m too old for all this revolution—I’m just happy to have gotten through the second world war. Can’t these young people content themselves with what they’ve got. Smaller classes, shorter work weeks, no respect for authority—nothing good will come from all this. I make most of my money ferrying tourists and businessmen to and from the airport—if we are overcome by civil unrest, no one will come to France and my wife and I will be reduced to eating bread, lard and white beans.

In the center of town, near the Etoile* (today’s Place de Charles de Gaulle) and my hotel, (the New Majestic), life was proceeding along as normal—traffic was jammed together circling the Arc de Triomphe with horns blowing in this traffic nightmare of all time created by the intersection of five major boulevards at one, small roundabout, hence the name Etoile. I did, however, notice several small olive drab army personnel carriers parked unobtrusively in alleys here and there—I always took the presence of olive drab vehicles as a signal that the top powers