Special Collections can contain all manner of strange and unexpected items, for example a 12th-century knife attached to a deed or two dolls wearing the 1904 and 1952 habits of the Order of Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Evron (SLE/F/1-2). The Sudan Archive already includes an extensive and varied objects collection, to which was recently added the above box of butterflies collected in Sudan in the mid-1960s by Donald Saville, then a Physics lecturer at Khartoum University. Using C.E. Wilson’s works on the butterflies of Sudan (printed first in Sudan Notes and Records in 1949 and 1953) and the Picture Insect – Bug Identifier app (Andoid | Apple) most of the butterflies were identified. They include:
Pioneer white
Danaid eggfly
Crimson tip
African emigrant
Citrus swallowtail
Red underwing (Owlet moth species)
Broad-bordered grass yellow
Small salmon Arab
Spotted rustic
Zebra white
Yellow pansy
These are the first butterflies to find their way into the Sudan Archive, but of course other repositories in the UK contain extensive collections of Sudanese Lepidoptera, for example the Hope Entomological Collections in Oxford and of course the Natural History Museum in London. These Saville butterflies join a large group of printed and archival material on the flora and fauna of Sudan and South Sudan, dating from the early reports of the Wellcome Research Laboratories to the papers of Dr Jesse and Sheila Hillman who, with S.M. Campbell, conducted research in the Bangangai Game Reserve in south west Sudan in the early 1980s. The Sudan Government during the Condominium period of British rule (1899-1956) was of course intensely occupied with the exploitation and optimisation of the immense natural resources of Sudan, from wildlife (e.g. ivory) to forestry, Nile waters to minerals, and the archive is correspondingly rich in related regulations, reports and surveys. Other biological material donated to the archive over the years includes botanical specimens collected by C.H. Thomson along the El Odaya to El Oga road in Kordofan in the late 1920s, reptile skins, a feather – brown with blue spots – of a bush Guinea fowl collected by M. Gildea Evans, and two weaver birds' nests from Bahr al-Ghazal Province donated by C.R. Williams.
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