When rain is in the air and the world is wrapped in a cheerful quiet, drag a chair to your balcony or a green patch in your neighbourhood. You can spot them quite easily — hovering by a flower or fluttering above a bush. The butterfly’s colours and its silent presence are bound to draw anyone who is interested in Nature. Chennai is home to over 100 butterfly species, says R. Bhanumathi, who has recently brought out a field guide on butterflies in Tamil titled Arimugak Kaiyedu —Vannathu Poochigal . Published by CreA, the pocket-size book has information on 90 butterfly species found in South India.
Bhanumathi’s book is the result of two years of travelling and photographing butterflies. She has always been interested in wildlife — she spent 15 years with the WWF, organising camps and wildlife activities. Her love for butterflies started when she was growing up in Delhi. “There were a lot of gardens and trees where we lived,” she recalls. She would observe these closely every day, fascinated by the metamorphosis of the caterpillar.
Once she got a camera of her own, Bhanumathi devised the ‘Learning through Lens’ project to study butterflies up close. “I took pictures and identified them back at home,” she explains. She has travelled across the country as part of her project and coined 90 Tamil names for butterflies for the book — these include some amusing ones such as ‘vaseegaran’ (pansy), ‘roja azhagi’ (common rose), and ‘karuveppilai azhagi’ (common mormon). “It was very challenging to coin names in Tamil since there’s no literature on butterflies in Tamil,” says Bhanumathi.
Her field guide, she says, is meant for the common man. It has, along with photographs, common, scientific and family names of butterflies in English and Tamil. “Eighty per cent of the species in the field guide can be seen in Chennai,” says Bhanumathi.
Butterflies are a good sign — their presence indicates a healthy eco-system. “They are not happy when there are buildings around,” she observes. This is because the insects need an undisturbed passage to fly.
The best time of the year to spot butterflies is from July to March, with chances peaking closer to December. They can be seen everywhere and at all times of the day, says Bhanumathi. “Some species prefer early mornings, while some even come out during the middle of the day,” she explains. But it’s ideal for one to step out at 7 a.m. to see them. Butterflies throng places where they can find food plants. In Chennai, for instance, they can be seen in places such at the IIT campus, MCC campus, Kalakshetra, Theosophical Society, Adyar Poonga and Semmozhi Poonga.
Bhanumathi has been using puppets to take wildlife to the people through the Pavai centre for puppetry. She now wants to inculcate an interest in butterflies among school children through awareness camps later this year. Photographing butterflies that flutter like phantoms in the green glow of the garden is time-consuming and demands a lot of patience, she adds. But it’s all worth it. “Their world is beautiful,” she says.
