Naturalist Born Thrillers

He sighs. Most of the great 19th-century naturalists were religious men. Darwin delayed the publication of his Origin of the Species because he knew the damage it could do to conventional religious thought. Like those early naturalists, Watts has chosen to study not the creator but creation. "To me, things are much too complicated to be created by something else," he says. "I mean, why produce all these bugs that are so much alike?"

He recalls as a boy looking at wild orchids in Florida and realizing that these nectarless plants engaged in an act of deception to attract bees. He experienced then what might be called a spiritual epiphany, that to see nature clearly is to see a network of relationships of plants and animals, of climate and geology. There was something mystical about nature that inspired awe and devotion. "I saw that it was like a web, that everything was interconnected," Watts recalls. "It was wonderful."

In tribute to the early naturalists, Watts twice a year -- at Christmas and the Fourth of July -- dresses up in the costume of an 18th-century gentleman, with knee breeches and waistcoat. He sets up a display of caterpillars in the Butterfly Center and holds court, talking to visitors about his passion. He doesn't put on accents or have a script. He just stands in the artificial jungle, the sun streaming through the glass overhead, the butterflies fluttering, the fake mist rising, and talks. That he is able to do so is something of a transformation. As a boy in rural South Carolina, he was an awkward, skinny kid who wore his older brother's high-water pants and was, he recalls, a "major introvert." But the butterflies have helped change that. And indeed, if you compare the goofy-looking kid of years past to the confident scientist in his blue waistcoat and knee breeches, holding an elegant lace butterfly net, a notion springs to mind: butterflies are not the only species to undergo transformations. Watts himself has undergone a metamorphosis, and become perhaps even better than he imagines an emblem of the creatures he raises.