The last time I had the pleasure of speaking with the Norwegian photographer Kjell Sandved, about 15 years ago, his butterfly alphabet had just become the best-selling educational nature poster in the world.

With about a million of his colorful images now gracing homes and schools everywhere, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the charming collection of stylized English letters and Arabic numbers Sandved discovered on the wings of butterflies while traveling through more than 30 countries over 25 years.

Perhaps, too, you or your children have delighted in the photographer’s innate ability to recognize something as familiar as a single “G” in what the rest of us might see only as a undifferentiated swirl of pearly pigment, a colorful splash of iridescence that lights briefly on a leaf in the backyard and then flits away.

Sandved has always had a knack for finding a universe of miniature wonders in what others overlook.

“Now I have found an even more diverse alphabet, as written by nature’s own hand in plants, animals and other natural objects,” he told me in a recent letter, which came with a copy of his second alphabetic gem.

“Nature Alphabet,” as Sandved explained in a phone conversation from his home in Washington, D.C., was as serendipitous an enterprise as his first.

In 1960, while visiting the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History to do research for a nature encyclopedia he hoped to publish, Sandved found an old cigar box full of exotic butterflies and moths in a dusty corner of the museum’s attic. As he studied the wings under a microscope, he noticed a perfect, silvery “F” in the markings of a little Sphinx moth.

A year later, it occurred to him that there might be other letters to be found in the markings of butterflies and moths. So he taught himself photography – he knew nothing of cameras before that – and embarked on a worldwide search through swamps and jungles for what would become his unique butterfly alphabet.

Following that success, and after many years of lecturing on nature photography for the Smithsonian, Sandved began scouring his vast inventory of images, hoping to find inspiration for a second poster project. Although not consciously looking for letters at first, he soon spotted one, then another. They appeared not only on the wings of butterflies, but in the shapes and markings of plant and animal life on land and in the sea.

“The idea came relatively fast when I realized there were new letters right in the archive,” Sandved said. “I started looking specifically for them and traveling again to find others.”

The result, published last year, reveals a common inchworm spanning a twig to form a whimsical “A.” Sandved spotted a “C” in the curved body of a colorfully striped Monarch butterfly larva in Brazil, while a “6” emerged in the velvety folds of a calla lily in Egypt. He found an “N” on an olive shell at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and an “I” in the eye of a fly. A viper snake found hanging from a branch in South America would become his elusive “Q,” a letter that nature provides stingily.

“I found that the letters that occur most in nature are those letters that are most common to our language,” Sandved said. “They are the ones the brain can perceive most quickly.”

Years of spotting letters and numbers in nature have convinced Sandved that such discovery is child’s play. You don’t necessarily need fancy photographic equipment to see them, nor the ability to wander the remote parts of the earth.

As the naturalist Louis Agassiz once said, “I spent the summer traveling. I got halfway across my backyard.”

“Most people have no idea how many beautiful things are out there for them to see,” Sandved said. “There is a line in a Theodore Roethke poem that says, ‘All finite things reveal infinitude.’ Those are words to live by.”

For information about the Butterfly Alphabet, the Nature Alphabet or other Sandved nature images, visit www.sandved.com, or call (800) ABC-WING.