Butterflies in your pocket — a flashcard series busts myths and makes nature playfully close

The Malabar Gladeye Bushbrown and the Blue Oakleaf; the flashcards also reveal how butterflies survive by trickery, from looking like a dead leaf to flashing oversized “eyes”. Pic/Jayesh Vishwakarma

India hasn’t lacked chroniclers of its butterflies. From Isaac Kehimkar’s iconic Butterflies of India field guide to regional gems like Butterflies of Bengaluru and Butterflies of Uttarakhand, the country’s winged wonders have been photographed, catalogued, and celebrated in painstaking detail. In the digital realm, the Butterflies of India website boasts over one lakh curated images, and its mobile app doubles as both a field guide and a citizen-science tool. On screen, too, Life of Butterflies — filmed in a Western Ghats park — brings their life stories to vivid cinematic life. 

Communities are joining in, too: in Delhi, the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) has stitched together urban butterfly corridors connecting micro-habitats across the city; in Trichy, a butterfly conservatory has been enriched with 100 host and nectar plants; the annual “Big Butterfly Month” curated by Sohail Madan of WildTales inspires online talks, walks, counts, and art, engaging amateur enthusiasts and youth across the country; and in Mumbai, BNHS’s Conservation Education Centre in Goregaon runs butterfly-themed courses and once hosted a vibrant Butterfly Festival. Yet for all this attention, old myths still flutter on — like the idea that butterflies live only a day, or that seeing them in a city garden is a rare miracle.

Black Rajah

It is against this backdrop that a new endeavour takes flight. The Edutainment Biodiversity Flashcard Series, created by the Grandala Enviro Foundation (a not-for-profit founded in Mumbai in 2024), and developed under the aegis of SPROUTS — a 30-year-old Mumbai-based environmental consulting and........

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