By Ivor Markman

Tracking down elusive butter­flies is what renowned South Afri­can entomologist Ernest Pringle, one of the men who rediscovered the rare Brenton Blue butterfly in the 1990s, is all about.

But what really moves him is unexpectedly coming across a new-­species while walking through the bush-and that's exactly what hap­pened to Pringle during a visit to Sutherland in the Northern Cape one hot December day in 1975.

While out on a field expedition looking for specimens, he strayed into a lonely kloof where he was attracted by a green melianthus plant that suggested water was nearby.

"Well, there's nothing else lying around here, let me try a different environment," he thought as he approached the plant.

Suddenly, a brownish butterfly flew past and settled on one of the leaves.

The moment it landed, Pringle thought, "you're brand new, I've never seen you before".

Entomologists have to be amongst the most observant peo­ple in the world.

Out of the thou­sands of different varieties - and many have similar colourings ­- Pringle was able to determine the slight colour variation that distin­guished this butterfly from others.

When he was finally able to cap­ture and examine the specimen, he confirmed it was definitely an un­known species and so to him fell the honour of naming it.

He called it Phasis pringlei.

Pringle had another exciting find in the 1980s.

A rare butterfly species was found at Melk­bosstrand but the colony was de­stroyed when the farmer cleared the land to create more farmland, ­the fate of many butterfly colonies on the western Cape coast.

The same butterfly species was later found at Mamre, but that colony also ran into trouble when heavy Port Jackson growth infest­ed the area.

Then an entomologist collecting horseflies for his research hun­dreds of kilometres away caught two specimens of the butterfly near Witsand in the southern Cape.

Pringle found out about the find but by the time he got to the area the following year the colony had been destroyed and the area was covered with bungalows.

"So we were back to square one," he said.

An intensive search was then started that eventually lasted sev­en years.

"I covered the whole area from de Hoop Nature Reserve right round to Stilbaai," he said.

Over the following years Pringle and his wife, Anne, systematically covered every piece of undis­turbed fynbos that they could find.

They could only look for the in­sect during its butterfly, or adult, stage of life.

"We knew we had to search from mid-August to mid-Septem­ber," he said.

Pringle was on the point of giv­ing up and on the very last day of that particular search period, while he was sitting in the car waiting for his wife to open a gate, a single specimen fluttered over the car.

He recognised it and jumped out of the car, bounding through the bushes in his eager­ness to bring his long search to fruition.

"He tried to chase it down, hold­ing a sandwich he had been eating in one hand, waving frantically with the other hand and trying to catch it, while at the same time in­dicating for me to get the net," said Anne.

"The sandwich literally bit the dust."

Unfortunately the butterfly es­caped and so the Pringles extend­ed their stay by a few days.

Even­tually they found the colony about 500 metres away in an area the size of half a tennis court.

"Ernest was so excited he start­ed jumping up and down.

“I was just totally relieved that he had fi­nally found it," said Anne.