As those who follow my journal may know, I love butterflies. During this summer, my goal is to do a little inventory in our garden to see, how many species there visit.

However, since we are from all over the world (and USA alone is a big place), I would like to start a Butterfly Challenge for this summer. The idea is simple enough: take a picture of a butterfly you have seen, and post it to this thread.
The challenge lasts for the whole summer, and you can post as many pictures as you like. If you can recognize the species (and any additional information of it), that's cool, but not a requirement. However, I think this would be more fun if we really posted only photos we have taken by ourselves.

Besides enjoying the summer nature around us, I hope that this Challenge will provide everyone fun exercise.


To start, here is the picture that I took the other day:


Painted Lady butterfly Vanessa cardui. Migrating butterfly, spends winters in the South and comes to north for summers. Rated uncommon.

We have a butterfly pavilion near our home and my husband has tons of beautiful pictures from there.  I unfortunately can not go back though because I get really scared of things flying toward me and almost killed one that landed on me.      I love to see pictures of them though!

I saw a Manarch and a Black Swollowtail in the woods behind work when I woke from my afternoon nap. The Manarch was excercising it's wings on a weed and was small for that type, possibly real young.

No pictures... I don't use a camera often.  There was a time I knew my butterflies, but I guess the info has been erased do to lack of use from memory.

Beautiful pictures, LaDiosa! I'm so glad to see that so many of you are interested of the Challenge- also mental support is welcome for us who chase the little flying gems.

joeydog, internet is a really good help in putting names to butterflies. You might find something about butterflies of your region, and if you are lucky, you might even find a naming guide that shows you pictures of different species.
You could also look from books.
     Some species are really easy, while some others are very difficult. Unless you know to which group your butterfly belongs, it's a good idea to try to memorize also details. For example, in Finland we have several species of Whites that look the same when viewed from some distance. In order to determine the species, you need to get a really good look. So far, I have been able to confirm just one species, though I am almost sure that all the white butterflies flying around in our garden are not of that same species. And I won't even get to the situation with Blues...
I'm sorry I can't be much of help here- I don't know anything about species outside Finland -hence this thread...

Greek Lady- I know who that striped yellow fellow is!

It's Scarce Swallowtail (Iphiclides podalirius). A handful of them have been spotted in Finland over the years, but they all have been rare wanderers.

Beautiful pictures!

Here's mine!


These butterflies are so cute and are everywhere


Not a butterfly, but this little gem of a dragon fly landed on me and looked me as to say take a pic, so I did!  Its hard to see but he has a white dot on the tip of his wing and his body is electric blue