Four Wings and a Prayer by Sue Halpern, Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Pantheon,
£12.99, ISBN 0297842218
IN BLACKER moments, agonising about the often childish preoccupations of
science with novelty and rarity, I like to think of mice, robins and cabbage
butterflies to remind myself how many fellow biologists (even lepidopterists)
can stay in love with the common, the ordinary, the seemingly well known. As Sam
Berry, David Lack and Miriam Rothschild all showed, there is nothing mundane
about any of these creatures.
This delightful book is about a heterogeneous group of biophiles, linked by
their lifelong obsession with one of the most common…
