Worth a Flutter

Lepidopterist Olga of Greece and Denmark finds herself on a wing and a prayer in Tajikistan, trying to net a rare and elusive butterfly

“Would you prefer English or Continental pins?” asked the voice at the end of the receiver. I was on the horn with Watkins & Doncaster, premier supplier of equipment for the study of the natural sciences, a venerable British institution as English as pork pie and an elegant throwback to the Victorian era when the pursuit of the natural sciences was at its zenith, and conversations about pin lengths (Continental pins are longer), retractable nets and other equipment were the norm. Placing an order with Watkins & Doncaster is a time-honoured ritual before any excursion, whether to the dense jungles of Borneo or the high plateaus of Central Asia. This time I was gathering supplies for an upcoming butterfly-collecting expedition to the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan. I ordered the usual equipment: nets, moth traps, killing fluid and conservation boxes.

I arrived in Tajikistan in early June. I landed in Dushanbe in the middle of the night after an interminable flight in a rusty Tupolev from Moscow. The next morning I headed for the Academy of Science. My first order of business was to secure a collecting permit, an essential document for any serious expedition, which, as the name suggests, gives the right to the holder to collect and kill certain types of butterflies and moths for scientific purposes. It may seem overly rigorous, if not downright silly, to seek collecting permits in a comparatively lawless country but, in deference to the Tajik scientific community and their natural heritage, it is important to do so. My wanderings from one ministry to the next were very agreeable as Dushanbe is a pleasant city, with wide tree-lined streets and charming low, three-storey buildings. Most of the architecture is from the early Soviet era but embellished with Oriental touches such as pointy arches and intricate stucco details ribboned like Oriental calligraphy, which give the city its distinctive charm. (Unfortunately,these buildings arefast disappearing, replaced by the poor man’s Dubai; cheap glass high-rises with as much marble and faux gold as possible – the preferred style of Central Asian neo-nomenklatura.)

Most of my days in the city were spent with louche government officials and crusty old academics whose frosty reception and laconic replies to all my questions soon made me feel rather uncomfortable. I had the distinct impression that the scientists were eyeing me with suspicion. Was it the Louboutin heels and the Prada ensemble or something more sinister, I wondered? After a little undercover investigation of my own, I discovered that these poorly funded scientific institutions are facing a grave problem: butterfly poachers. And my prying questions about different butterfly habitats had done little to reassure my Tajik interlocutors. Only recently, two poachers posing as Ukrainian scientists had infiltrated the Tajik scientific community, extracted all the relevant information and proceeded into the mountains to collect rare and endangered species which they then smuggled out of the country. Afraid that I, too, was a poacher, they remained vague and unapproachable and refused to give me a permit. Nothing could dissuade them from this notion. Faced with the desecration of their natural heritage the Tajik scientists have little recourse but obtusenessas the authorities, overwhelmed by far greater problems than butterfly poachers, do little to help. The last arrest they made was in 1999, when a group of hunters was arrested with over 3,000 rare butterflies on their persons – but perhaps it was the 120kg of opium that they were also smuggling that spurred the authorities into action?

Having failed to establish my innocence, I nonetheless forged ahead and flew to Khorog, the capital of Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province and last bastion of semi-civilisation before the great wilderness of the Pamir Mountains. These mountains are fraught with danger; at the crossroads between Tajikistan, Afghanistan, China and Pakistan, the impregnable peaks are a den of high-altitude bandits, smugglers and ruffians, where abject poverty and porous borders have made for a brisk heroin trade. Lyrical and hard-edged like the mountains that stand before them, the Pamiris are generous, proud and excessive, and have weathered adversity and the conflicts which have raged all around them with a dignity befitting these ancient peoples. It is a tough place. My intended destination was Lake Sarez, deep in the Pamir Mountains, one of the most beautiful and inaccessible places on earth and home to one of the world’s rarest butterflies, the Parnassius autocrator. The lake was formed in 1911 when a massive landslide caused by an earthquake blocked the flow of the Murghob River. On the steep slopes of the lake lives this rare and beautiful butterfly which I hoped to study. It is a somewhat pressing matter as the entire ecosystem is in danger; the lake is located in a seismic zone, and scientists fear that if another strong earthquake hits the area it could trigger further landslides that, in turn, could generate an enormous wave which, if it crashed over the natural dam, would cause catastrophic flooding downriver, devastating the entire area.

My mind was not on raging rivers, nor on poppies, but on insects. I headed for the Pamir Biological Institute in Khorog, where its cheery director, Ogonazar Aknazarov, greeted me at the entrance. He was as kind and as helpful as possible, but there was little he could do. Years of plundering by the Soviet invaders had left all the scientific institutions of Tajikistan destitute. As a final insult, the retreating Russians absconded with everything they could including, in this case, the precious butterfly collections. The ensuing years of civil war left the country even poorer, and lofty pursuits of winged beauties were the last thing on anyone’s mind. I realised that any attempt to collect butterflies today is hampered by problems far greater than obtaining collecting permits. Not only is there no reference collection, there are simply no lepidopterists at hand, nor researchers, nor storage areas, nor material. In fact, during my entire séjour the closest I came to meeting an insect enthusiast was a brief encounter with a parasitologist. With no collecting permits and few options available, I had to give up my quest for the elusive Parnassius autocrator. But I will return to Tajikistan and hopefully – with the help of the Aga Khan Development Network and other NGOs such as the Christensen Fund, which have worked tirelessly to bring life back to the country, and in collaboration with my esteemed Tajik colleagues – I will be able to map out an expedition to the mythical Lake Sarez.

For the moment I have to content myself with a beautiful volume of the Butterflies of Tajikistan.

–The Princess of Greece and Denmark is a writer and a social butterfly

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