jhyatt
Aurelian
Posts: 224
Country: U.S.A.
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Post by jhyatt on Mar 17, 2020 21:16:52 GMT
Henry W. Bates found perhaps the best butterfly collecting of his long travels in Amazonia at a place called Ega in his day, now known as Tefe. It's where the Rio Tfe enters the upper Amazon (Solimoes). In his 2nd long stay there, he found something like 550 butterfly species, a sizable percentage of which were new at the time (ca. 1850). He wrote that he seldom found fewer than "4 or 5 new insects every day" near Tefe. It must have been a fantastic place to collect!
Back in the '70's and '80's I used to purchase accumulations of butterflies from the Brazilian commercial collectors, principally Kesselring but also from a few others. They sent material from Obidos, Santarem, the vicinity of Manaus, and from southern Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul, Sta. Caterina, Parana, etc), according to the triangle labels.
But I never saw a single specimen come in from Tefe.
Did none of the commercial colelctors work near Tefe? Does anyone on this forum have Tefe material? How did you get it? Did that area become hard to get to? Protected?
Or did the commercial people collect there, but the material was labeled with its shipping point, Manaus or Santarem, say?
I'm curious,
JH
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Post by nomad on Mar 18, 2020 20:56:12 GMT
Not sure of the current situation there regarding commercial collecting, and the changes there, but as you say Bates enjoyed his collecting at Ega (Tefe). Not too long ago I was looking at some Bates material from Ega in the little known Foreign collection of J.C. Dale at Oxford. Dale purchased his Bates and Wallace specimens from their agent Samuel Stevens in London. Dale's Foreign collection is a little-studied treasure trove. Dale's collection contains some of Wallace's Brazilian butterflies, which are especially valuable, as nearly all his specimens burnt when his ship caught fire. Here is a female Asterope batesii specimen that Bates caught while at Ega. Dale coll, OUMNH.
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jhyatt
Aurelian
Posts: 224
Country: U.S.A.
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Post by jhyatt on Mar 19, 2020 13:49:01 GMT
Seeing things like this and reading the accounts of the old-time collectors makes me commit the sin of envy every time!
Thanks, jh
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