Grapevine

Ailing New Zealand butterfly collector gives away life's work

A New Zealand enthusiast spent half a century amassing one of the world's largest private butterfly collections. As death nears, he has handed this life's work of 20,000 specimens to a museum.

Wheelchair-bound and ravaged by multiple sclerosis, 68-year-old John McArthur vividly recalls the first time he saw a butterfly.

He was 10 years old and it was a shock of yellow and black, a swallowtail butterfly flitting among the zinnia flowers in his mother's New York garden.

"I was mesmerized," McArthur says, recounting the first step of a journey that would take him from the Amazon to the Himalayas, the Andes back to his native New Zealand.

Over nearly 60 years, he collected more than 20,000 specimens, a kaleidoscope of color and life that he painstakingly pinned into hundreds of boxes that lined the walls of his home.