About Us
The Butterfly Boutique is:
Nigel Venters, Linda Rogers, Grace Venters and Paul Chesterfield.
Nigel Venters
Company Manager, Resident Butterfly Expert! Nigel first collected a caterpillar on his way home from school aged 6! This was at a time when most collectors just pinned their butterflies. Nigel wanted to learn more about them, and see them alive.
Now some 55 years later, he is a professional entomologist, who is recognised by most as the World’s leading expert on breeding butterflies.
He has several species new to science named after him, but most pride goes to a beautiful, and very large blue butterfly, Charaxes ventersi, which he discovered in Central Africa and is named after him. He developed his first butterfly farm in 1976 in Central Africa, where he lived for 7 years, and hasn’t looked back since.
He also spent 4 years in the Sudan, and discovered another butterfly, new to science, (named after his daughter) in a remote and very dangerous region on the border with Southern Sudan and Uganda.
He has travelled to Canada, the US, Central America, (Even spending 4 weeks in the Amazon rainforest) South America, Africa, Europe, the Far East, and Australia working and consulting on commercial butterfly interests.
He also spent 4 years in the Sudan, and discovered another butterfly, new to science, (named after his daughter) in a remote and very dangerous region on the border with Southern Sudan and Uganda.
He is a former Vice-President of the International Butterfly Breeders Association, (IBBA) and has regularly lectured, as lead presenter at many of their conferences.
He has written several books on butterflies, (see HERE) and he also regularly runs Butterfly breeding Workshops, on-line for commercial breeders from around the World.
Linda Rogers
Business Manager, Butterfly Breeder. Linda has spent her life in Project Management, and organises all of the BB business. She is also an extremely experienced and proficient butterfly breeder and has presented papers several times at International Butterfly Breeder conferences.
Grace Venters
Training, Spanish Region Manager, Translator, Butterfly Breeder. Grace works with the educational side of the business, giving presentations to young people on insects and butterflies. A lifelong and experienced breeder of butterflies, and fluent in Spanish, she also translates and deals with all the BB business from the Spanish speaking World.
Paul Chesterfield
IT Manager. Paul is our IT expert, and works wonders for us with our projects. He created our Butterfly Boutique website and controls all of the “BB” on-line workshops. He also takes all the papers and ensures they are presented as a fully “professional” report.
Paul has gained awards for photographic merit from the Royal Photographic Society (Associateship: ARPS) and the Photographic Alliance of Great Britain (Distinction: DPAGB), and is a gifted wild-life photographer. You can view some of his books on the website.
Paul's has a background in cartography and digital mapping with Ordnance Survey, Britain's national mapping agency. During a 32-year career at OS, he worked on most scales of mapping from very large (1:1250) to very small (1:1,000,000). With the introduction of computers he studied for a computer science degree and subsequently joined the R&D dept as a researcher/ programmer. He was involved with the development of digital mapping, map generalisation, street mapping and mapping for early Sat Navs. Toward the end of his time at Ordnance Survey he was a Project Manager with responsibility for managing various R&D, survey and map production teams.
