A Tiny Extinction

A butterfly. A fire. A sacrifice.

They arrive at different times. One vanishes before I ever meet it. One scorches the town I would one day call home. One drifts across a school field in 2006 and leaves me with a poem I don’t understand until years later.

I’m trying to thread them together now, to understand what we lose, and how quietly and quickly we lose it.

The 2017 Knysna fires did not start the way you’d expect. For one, it was winter. Not the blistering, fire-warning days of December or January. But it had been a dry season, unforgiving, and when lightning struck the mountains surrounding, fires flared in places too steep, too remote to reach. All it took was a gust of wind and a smoldering ember to transform the landscape.

I was still at university then, a few hours’ drive away. Knysna was not my home yet, but I had come to know it well. My boyfriend was from here. I’d spent many holidays in its deep, wise forests, walked along the estuary and shorelines and listened to stories about the elephants said to haunt the forest. When the fire came, we came to help. We watched familiar places turn to ash.

What I didn’t know—what none of us knew at the time—was that something else had vanished too. Something smaller. Quieter. A tiny extinction we would only come to realise later.

*

In March of 2006, I was thirteen and deeply romantic in the way only a teenager with a difficult past can be. My high school crush and I would meet during break times and walk slow laps around the sports field, fingers intertwined, blushing and speaking in hushed voices about the world and our lives as if we understood them. It all felt so adult, so important. The field became our meeting place, our orbit.

That’s where I first noticed them. White butterflies, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, moving with deliberate purpose. They passed over the grass in steady waves, day after day, always going in the same direction, like they knew something we didn’t. I watched them silently as the rest of the school carried on; laughing, shouting, kicking up dust. No one else seemed to notice. Or if they did, they didn’t seem to care.

One afternoon I told my dad about it, and a few days later he showed me an article in our local newspaper. The butterflies were migrating — more than that, dispersing. 

It was called a “dispersal event,” he explained, a moment when individuals leave their natal habitat, perhaps never to return. I couldn’t stop thinking about that word. 

Dispersal. It sounded so gentle for something so irreversible.

I wrote a poem. It was published in the Northside Chronicle, and I kept the clipping, feeling like a poet, a writer. Feeling like I understood the world. 

Beautiful Sacrifice
I’m sure you’ve all been amazed
at these butterflies, flying around unfazed.
To us it’s merely an interesting attraction,
but to them it’s actually a heart-wrenching action.
They’re flying a dangerous journey with no hope;
it’s a miracle how many of them cope.
There is a terrible generation overlap,
yet we don’t even care if their wings don’t flap.
Their entire being is devoted to love;
a love that can only be sent from above.
They are flying far, far away
simply to save those that stay.
I wonder how they decide who leaves?
I wonder how they decide who breathes?
The mystery of their amazing show,
is actually a beautiful sacrifice, you know.

At the time, I didn’t realise the poem had anything to do with me. I thought I was writing about butterflies. But looking back now, I wonder if I already understood something about what it means to leave. What it means to love someone and still go.

A year later, I made my own migration. Home had become untenable — a house cracking under the weight of financial stress, a fractured family, an older sister who one night simply told us to leave. My father, once steady and golden, had become someone lost and tired, adrift in his own struggles.

So I left. I moved to East London to live with my aunt and uncle, leaving behind my father, my school, my field of butterflies. It wasn’t a grand decision. It was a moment that changed the trajectory of my life. There was no ceremony to it. Just a suitcase and the understanding that something had to give — and that this time, it was me.

I’ve often wondered who I might have become if I had stayed. But like the butterflies, I didn’t leave to chase something better. I left so that something — someone — might survive.

*

In 2022, five years after the fires, John proposed to me on Brenton Beach. It was a quiet, salt-tinged evening on our ten-year anniversary — the sky just beginning to bruise into sunset, the wind soft enough to carry only the sound of waves and seabirds. He was nervous. He knew it was my favorite place.

We had walked there often in the years since moving to Knysna. The boardwalk that cuts under Milkwood thickets and through fragrant cape snowbush, the way the beach stretches on in both directions like it could take you somewhere else entirely. I always found something calming there. A sense that things could begin again.

When he knelt in the sand, ring box in hand, I was stunned by the stillness of it all. There were no fireworks. Just the hush of the sea and the slow realization that this, too, was home now.

I didn’t know then what else this place had held, and what was already gone.

*

The Brenton Blue Butterfly (Orachrysops niobe) was once found only here, on this very stretch of coast where John proposed to me. Delicate and elusive, it was one of South Africa’s most endangered butterflies, known for its vibrant blue wings and it’s incredibly specialized life cycle.​

What made the Brenton Blue so unique wasn’t just its rarity, but its intricate dependence on a specific environment. The butterfly’s larvae fed exclusively on the rootstock of the Indigofera erecta plant, a legume native to the fynbos. But even more fascinating was its symbiotic relationship with a particular ant species, Camponotus baynei. The ants protected the larvae from predators and, in return, fed on the sugary secretions the larvae produced. This delicate balance meant that the butterfly’s survival hinged on the presence of both the host plant and the specific ant species. 

In June 2017, the Knysna fires ravaged the landscape, including the Brenton Blue Butterfly Reserve. The intense heat and flames destroyed not only the vegetation but also the dead wood that Camponotus baynei ants used for nesting. Without their ant guardians and host plants, the butterflies couldn’t complete their life cycle. A few adults were spotted a few months after the fires in 2017, but none have been seen since. 

Standing on Brenton Beach, accepting John’s proposal, I was unaware of this tiny extinction. The very place that symbolized a new beginning for me had, unbeknownst to us, witnessed an end.

*

I first saw the photo on Facebook: the Knysna lagoon road swallowed in black smoke. I showed it to John. Neither of us knew what we were looking at, not really. It felt impossible — that something like this could be happening in a town we knew so well.

He called his parents. I heard his mother’s voice through the phone, exhausted and scared: “Liefie dit is erg.” (Sweetheart, it’s bad.) She said they hadn’t evacuated yet, but the car was packed. They were ready if the wind shifted. Their beautiful home bordered the Knysna forest. It was surrounded by fynbos. If the fire came for them, there would be no stopping it.

We made the decision quickly — we would drive to Knysna to help. I kept scanning Facebook posts and local groups as we packed. I fed John updates: street names, suburbs, forests — places he’d grown up in — now smoldering or gone. It was like watching someone’s childhood burn. His grandparents had been evacuated onto Brenton Beach in the dead of night. It was surreal. 

The drive through Storms River was surreal. Flames on both sides of the highway, veld fires licking at the edges of the road. We followed a truck stacked high with bales of lucerne, knowing one ember could ignite it all. The smoke thickened. So did our silence. We began to understand how serious this was.

When we arrived, the phone lines had been down for some time. We’d been unable to reach John’s parents, and for a moment we feared the worst. But they were there, waiting. Still safe. The fire hadn’t come. Not yet.

Communities had already begun to form their own resistance. Neighbours gathered into amateur firefighting crews, stamping out embers, guarding homes with buckets, towels, and garden hoses.

John and I joined in where we could. We took his father’s bakkie into town to fill a small water tank at the fire station. The streets were ghostly — houses still burning, the sky a sickly orange, thick with smoke. At the station, we were welcomed like heroes. Our tank was filled. They handed us bottled water, chocolates. They thanked us. I couldn’t understand it. We weren’t the heroes. We were just subbing for the real players. The ones that had been fighting fires for days on end already.

In a clothing store I bought a thermal shirt — it was winter, and the cold crept in between fire patrols. 

When I put the shirt on later, it already smelled of fire.

*

The fire, they said, was started by lightning. An act of nature. But that wasn’t the whole story.

It had been a dry winter — the kind that used to be rare and now wasn’t. The landscape, parched. Alien vegetation, highly flammable and poorly managed, had crept further into the reserve. Knysna’s growing sprawl had meant more houses were at risk. Fynbos is meant to burn — it needs fire to regenerate. But not like this. Not this hot. Not this fast. Not this out of balance.

Like so many disasters now, it wasn’t just one thing. It was the consequence of accumulation: a warming climate, a shifting wind, a single ember.

And it wasn’t just homes and forests that burned. Species vanished too, many without notice. We are living in a time when disappearance has become ordinary — entire ecosystems blinking out in a single generation.

The Brenton Blue Butterfly was already in danger long before the fire. As early as the 1990s, conservationists warned of its extinction. By the time the fire swept through the last known reserve, it didn’t have much left to lose. Just a few patches of Indigofera erecta. A few nests of protective ants. A few fragile wings.

*

The Brenton Blue wasn’t lost to mystery. It wasn’t one of those species that slipped away in the background, unnoticed. We knew.

In the 1990s, when plans were drawn up for a luxury housing estate on the slopes of Brenton-on-Sea, conservationists sounded the alarm. It was a familiar equation: rarity traded for revenue. Biodiversity sacrificed for a better sea view.

The butterfly’s habitat was already vanishing. It existed nowhere else in the world. Without that small stretch of fynbos, without the Indigofera erecta plant, without the ants that lived in deadwood and tended to the larvae like shepherds — it would die. It needed all of these things, at the same time, in the same place.

Eventually, a sliver of land was set aside. A protected area. A reserve. A compromise. But compromises don’t always work when something requires precision.

The butterfly’s population never fully recovered. It flickered back briefly — a few adults seen in the early 2000s by lepidopterists who knew what to look for.

After the 2017 fire, entomologists and lepidopterists searched the area. The fynbos was scorched. The Indigofera burned. The ant nests turned to ash. A few adult butterflies emerged months later, as if from muscle memory. But they had nowhere to lay their eggs. The life cycle could not continue.

And then — nothing.

In a way, it felt like a disappearance foretold. We’d seen it coming. We just did nothing to stop it.

What a thing, to know the exact terms of survival — and still fall short.
What a thing, to look back and realize that extinction isn’t loud or full of ceremony and fanfare. It happens while you’re fighting fires and building homes and forgetting to notice.

*

Lately, on my morning walks, I’ve seen small black butterflies. They hover in the sunlit pockets along my route, flitting just ahead of me as if inviting me to follow, to notice. Not hundreds. Not thousands. Just enough to make me pause.

I looked them up. Dira clytus. The Cape autumn widow. They have one generation per year, emerging only briefly before disappearing again, heralding in the winter season. Their presence feels deliberate, seasonal, ceremonial. A quiet persistence.

Seeing them brought me back to 2006 — to those white butterflies sweeping across the school field, to the dispersal event that felt like a message, even if I didn’t yet understand it. It brought me back, too, to this place I now call home. To the love that anchored me here. To the fire that changed it. To the absence of wings where there should have been wings.

I often think about what it means to belong to a place — not just to live in it, but to learn its patterns, its silences. What it means to fall in love with somewhere that has already lost something essential and my role in that. 

One day, maybe soon, I’ll raise a family here. I’ll take my children to Brenton Beach, tell them about my proposal. We’ll eat at the Brenton Blue Restaurant.
But the butterfly that gave the place its name — it breaks my heart that they’ll never see it.

And when they ask me what we did to save it, I don’t think I’ll be able to lie.
I’ll tell them we knew. I’ll tell them we waited too long. We didn’t pay enough attention.

I hope they’ll understand.
I hope we’ll still have other wings to notice.