The 7th June 2025 is Butterfly Education and Awareness Day and, to mark this, we thought we would write about “Mr Ray’s Purple Streak Butterfly”. This was the English common name given by James Petiver in 1702 to the butterfly that is commonly known today as the Purple Hairstreak (Favonius quercus) . James Petiver was a friend and sometime assistant of John Ray. Petiver was subsequently described as “the father of British butterflies” as a result of his detailed work on the i