Finding life and satisfaction within butterflies
Butterfly hunter searches the worldfor new species; finds
happiness in simplicity
By Fred Bruning
Newsday
West Islip, N.Y. — Butterfly hunter Steve Fratello lives a simple life — a one-bedroom apartment on Long Island, nondescript furniture, a bookshelf that sags under the weight of the Time-Life “Library of Art”
eries, 20-year-old stereo, no telephone answering machine and has a ’93
Mazda Protege parked out front.
In terms of creature comforts, all he has is all he needs, said Fratello,
44, who works for a trucking company that delivers supplies to Burger
King.
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Courtesy of Newsday
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“The things of this world have no meaning for me,” said Fratello.
To be honest, Fratello craves less comfort. Much less.
Fratello longs to be where the humidity is oppressive, the temperature extreme, the terrain wild and malaria a possibility. Ah, said Fratello, to be where snakes writhe on the rain forest floor and ants skedaddle on his sweaty skin, and where the evening meal may be a mouthful of minnows, fried nice and crisp, like julienne potatoes.
“I was always interested in nature,” said Fratello, walking barefoot across his shaggy gold carpet to fetch a photograph of himself in Guyana. “The more pristine, the better I liked it.”
The places to which he travel are pristine — remote sections of New Guinea, Indonesia, Peru, Venezuela, Guyana, Australia and CostaRica. His snapshots show scenes of nature you don’t get cruising a U.S. highway: mountain ranges, waterfalls, river beds and jungles as dark as night.
“I just knew about places from reading,” said Fratello, a tan, wiry fellow with metal frame glasses and a shaved head who looks in good enough shape to enroll again at the U.S. Air Force Academy, his alma mater. “I saw pictures in books and said, ‘I’m going.’”
Fratello, who grew up on Long Island, figures he has spent as many as 1,000 days in the rain forest over the past 15 years, of which much of his time was spent searching for rare moths and butterflies, whose loveliness convinced him of the greatness of the universe and its creator.
He retrieved three display boxes of butterflies from Peru and Guyana and placed them on the kitchen table. Carefully, he lifted specimen after specimen, each impaled on a pin.
“In here, there is more variety than we can fathom,” said Fratello. “Color, shape, pattern — it’s staggering, the beauty in this box.” Before him, he said, were perhaps 50 of an estimated 20,000 butterfly species. The thought seemed to dazzle Fratello anew.
“Who could make beauty like this besides God?”
Fratello is not religious in the orthodox sense — don’t look for him in the next pew on Sunday — though he attended Catholic and Presbyterian churches as a child. But he is convinced his affinity for nature is not random fortune.
“God gave me a strong aesthetic sense,” said Fratello. “Very strong.”
Somewhere along the line, Fratello developed a hefty sense of purpose, too.
After graduating from the academy in 1978 as a basic sciences major, he served six years in the Air Force. Fratello, a B-52 navigator with the rank of captain, was stationed in Guam for most of his hitch. He liked the service, but wanted more than life aloft in a bomber. Using money he saved while in the Air Force, Fratello began traveling to out-of-the-way places. He would spend two to four months in the jungle and then return to Long Island when it was time to replenish his bank account. He worked in a warehouse, as a messenger in Manhattan and on the production line of a bakery.
“I even dropped candy corn on Halloween cookies,” Fratello recalled.
For the past seven years, he has been hauling boxes into Burger King.
“Physical job,” he said. “Decent pay. Good benefits.”
His is not the typical career trajectory of an Air Force Academy graduate.
“Most go into the flying careers as a pilot or navigator,” said Terry Barretta, public affairs officer at the academy. If they leave the service, she said, graduates are apt to become commercial fliers or corporate CEOs. Fratello’s choice? “Most unusual,” said Barretta.
Not in his world, said Fratello. In his world, nature counts more than NASDAQ.
Advanced degrees? No thanks. The fellow that schoolchildren call “the butterfly man” — Fratello often speaks to classes on Long Island — could study lepidopterology for a formal education in moths and butterflies. But he’d rather be in the brush than cooped up on campus.
Fratello’s lack of academic pedigree — and his spiritual interpretation of the universe (he accepts the theory of evolution but sees God as central to the grand design) — may leave the natural sciences establishment unimpressed.
“He doesn’t necessarily get taken seriously by academia, but often knows more than they do because of his own fierce passion,” said Robert Hanner, who holds a doctorate in biology and is manager of genetic resources at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, where Fratello serves each month as a volunteer in the entomology department.
The two traveled to Guyana last year on a butterfly expedition that allowed Fratello to pursue his passion in a way Hanner considers rare.
“He is forged out of material that few modern people are,” said Hanner. “He is willing to work a menial job, and save every penny, and take a two months’ leave and live out of knapsack.” Fratello follows the footsteps of 18th- and 19th-century naturalists who trekked into the wilds for the love of discovery, said Hanner. “He is a self-taught expert.”
Self-taught and self-wrought. “I’m more and more of a maverick-type person who doesn’t work usually within the system,” said Fratello. “There are benefits and some deficiencies.”
It surely was not through the system that he got his start in the butterfly business.
While on a trip to Australia in 1987, Fratello visited a library in Cairns, Queensland, and was studying a book on indigenous butterflies when another person said he was looking for the same volume. The man turned out to be Jan Pasternak, a naturalist and author. The two became friends and Pasternak asked Fratello to collect butterflies for him in New Guinea. Fratello took the job and found a vocation.
“Serendipitously,” said Fratello.
Since his chance meeting with the Czech, Fratello has chased butterflies in the distant reaches of Central and South America and the Malay Archipelago, and has placed material at museums in Florida, New York and Peru.
His trip with Hanner in spring 1999 was to the highlands of Guyana. Fratello collected more than 1,000 butterflies representing 500 species — capturing the creatures in nets, killing them with a pinch to the thorax, and storing them carefully in envelopes for the trip home.
Most of his material went to the Smithsonian Institution, which helped finance the expedition — an exciting addition to the museum’s collection, said Don Harvey, an entymology specialist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
“He visited areas that have not been collected before — some very remote areas with high elevations — and brought back a number of butterflies that appear to be new to science.”
Hanner said the experience was unforgettable. The butterflies. The countryside. The malaria. Hanner battled illness for several days and at one point, he said, fell into a “hallucinogenic” state. Luckily, the sojourners — Hanner, Fratello and their Guyanese guides — were carrying medication that quelled the malaria. After a few days’ rest, Hanner rallied.
Fratello is ready to go again.
He plans to return to Guyana again if arrangements can be worked out with the Smithsonian. Travel is expensive and Fratello can only go so far as his money — or help from outside sources — allows.
“I want to bring back the beauty of the physical universe to others,” he said.