It is believed that the scales on the wings of the male butterfly exude a scent which stimulates the female sexually. The female’s sensory organs appear to be located in her antennae, and the male rubs his scales on the antennae of the female.

If the female’s reaction is positive, the male lines up the tip of his abdomen with hers and mating commences. And sometimes the female, settled on the leaf with outspread wings, raises her abdomen out of reach of the hovering male to signal her unwillingness to mate.

Revelations such as this, or that “drunken moths behave no differently from their human counterparts when they are tipsy” form the core of Peter Smetacek’s freewheeling memoir, Butterflies on the Roof of the World. “One gets to know how butterflies use their wings to reflect solar radiation into their bodies and how each species has developed its wing shape, colour and pattern to help surmount the challenges it faces.”

He loves lepidoptera, and exposes to us their mysterious world right from the high desert landscapes of Ladakh to the leopard and bear-infested forests of Kumaon. Like his father, he was bitten by the butterfly bug quite early in his life. He caught his first one when he was three.

Smetecek has published sixty papers on moths and butterflies and has described a dozen new to science. He pioneered the use of lepidoptera as indicators of climate change with a paper published in 1994. He lives with his wife and two children in Bhimtal, Uttarakhand, where he runs the Butterfly Research Centre which holds more than 10,000 species – the largest private collection of its kind in the country.

Published in 2012.