butterfly

Scientific Name: Rhopalocera

Butterflies are a common garden insect that are beneficial to your garden!

How to identify:

Most notable feature of butterflies are their large, detailed and often colourful wings.
They have fairly long and narrow bodies in between their large wings, and antennae with what seems like little balls at the end of them.

Benefits:

Butterflies play an important role in your garden with regards to pollination.
As pollinators, they take pollen from one plant to the next which fertilizes it and starts the process of seed and fruit development.
In a way, it is pollinators like butterflies that keep your garden alive.

How to make your garden butterfly friendly:

Butterflies love the sun, so try to plant most your flowers in a sunny area (which is also good for your flowers).
The best way to attract butterflies to your garden is by planting flowers that have a lot of nectar as this is what they consume.
Flowers that butterflies like include allium, buddleia, dianthus, daylily, goldenrod, lavender, lilac, phlox, echinacea, saliva, and chrysanthemums.
Keeping caterpillars happy is also a great way of insuring that butterflies will grow in your garden. They like plants such as clover, milkweed and violets.
Limit use of pesticides and insecticides are they can be very harmful towards butterfly species.

How this relates to conservation:

Butterfly populations are decreasing and we have even seen butterfly species go completely extinct in the past century.
There are various theories as to why the populations are declining the main conclusion is that we are destroying the habitats in which they would live.
Butterflies are a great indicator about the state of our environment since they are very sensitive to it. Therefore, if butterflies are not commonly seen around your house, this is an indicator that your backyard it not doing well ecologically.
Since butterflies are pollinators, they play a key role in crop fertilization which is very important for our food source.

Endangered Butterflies

Due to habitat loss, there are various species of butterflies that are currently endangered. Below is a list of the endangered and protected species along with pictures for identification. If you notice one of these species of butterflies in your garden here are a few things you can do:

Keep maintaining your garden and keep it as butterfly friendly as possible since the species have found refuge in your habitat.
Do not bother the species! Trapping them is actually illegal, but also is very harmful to their growth as a population.