New Book Review: Blue Morpho Butterfly

Title: Kids on Earth: Wildlife Adventures: Explore the World: Blue Morpho Butterfly: Costa Rica

Author: Sensei Paul David

Date: 2023

Publisher: Sensei Publishing

ISBN: 978-`077848-158-1

Quote: "The Blue Morpho butterfly is one of the largest butterflies in the world, with a wingspan of up to 8 inches."

To my taste, that's overdoing things, but some people like their butterflies large. 

This web site will focus on the Morphos in due time. They certainly have a beautiful range of colors--pale, cerulean, or indigo blue above, depending on how the light strikes them, and beige, brown, or blackish below--and a commanding presence. Swallowtails, Monarchs, and Diana Fritillaries catch the eye, but Morphos, which are similar in shape and color to Diana Fritillaries only more than twice the size, cannot be ignored. More than other butterflies they fail to fit into the category "bugs," as Americans dismissively call most insects, and remind us that they are animals--small and dumb, as animals go, but. Still.

It's a pleasure to be able to report that, when we look at Morphos, we'll see more about them than this book does. Of course, that's partly a difference of focus. Our "Butterfly of the Week" feature is for science students age ten to ninety, and this book seems to be for primary school students who like the idea of a book that counts lots of "chapters" consisting of a paragraph of text and a big glossy picture. Sensei Paul David counts this book as giving 30 fun facts about the Blue Morpho. I count three--it's big, it's fast, and it's a pollinator--and from that point the book drifts off into considering ways people use images of this butterfly in art. There are some live photos and some digital splices of butterfly photos into different kinds of backgrounds. Apart from postage stamps, and the Monarch-inspired dance costumes in California and Mexico, this web site has generally done little more than acknowledge that butterflies are often used in art. 

(Well, consider Zazzle. The photos of live butterflies in the "Save the Butterflies" Collection aren't unique, but they're a minority among the "butterfly" designs Zazzle prints. A majority are fancy sketches, hard to identify with any real species. Of identifiable butterfly images used on Zazzle, even though most of the designers and customers are in North America, the vast majority of the butterflies are Blue Morphos.)

This book has little to say about the lives of the giant butterflies designed to look camouflages against the sky, and won't satisfy a future biology major. It will delight future arts majors with its emphasis on images and symbolism. Any book with a photo of a Blue Morpho on every other page is guaranteed to be pretty, and this one is. Know your students. Sensei Paul David doesn't talk down to young readers, so teachers, grandparents, etc., can always tell the disappointed science majors they bought this book for their own pleasure. It's delicious eye candy.