purple emperor

plural purple emperors

1. A large, dark brown and white (female), or purple and white (male) butterfly, Apatura iris, of the family Nymphalidae.

   Purple emperors are an exquisite morass of contradictions: disdainful of human company yet undisturbed by it; regally garbed yet partial to faecal feasts.

   2016, James Lowen, A Summer of British Wildlife, page 120

   3 more examples

   A simple method will often bring them down even in their most rapid flight, and has been successfully employed in taking the Purple Emperor butterfly, (Apatura Iris,) namely, to throw up a stonr or piece of tile before them, which they will often fly down with, and alight on the ground, and are then easily captured.

   1827, Abel Ingpen, Instructions for Collecting, Rearing, and Preserving British Insects, page 36

   The Nymphalidae are a very extensive group, of generally strong-winged and very bright-coloured butterflies, very abundant in the tropics, and represented in our own country by our Fritillaries, our Vanessas, and our Purple-emperor.

   1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume I, London: Macmillan and Co., page 438

   Deep in the southern oakwoods in July the great Purple Emperors hold court round the airy crests of the boughs, amid a silence so songless and solemn that the rustle of their own high, flashing wings may sometimes be heard in the sunshine above the murmur of omnipresent insect life that is the warp and woof of the stillness.

   1907, Edward Thomas, British Country Life in Spring and Summer: The Book of the Open Air, page 26