Austin, Texas, is home to about 170 species of butterflies. It is also the home of the Austin Butterfly Forum, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to butterfly conservation and to enriching people's lives through butterflies. The Austin Butterfly Forum is a club that organizes field trips, conducts butterfly counts, promotes native gardening, performs conservation activities, and meets monthly for an educational presentation. We are a community of butterfly enthusiasts who also enjoy dragonflies & damselflies, bees, beetles, spiders and arthropods in general, and our meeting presentations span this gamut as well. Join Us!

Monarch, photo by Valerie Bugh

Meetings are held in the Zilker Garden Center, 2220 Barton Springs Rd., Austin, TX, 78746 at 7:00 PM on the fourth Monday of each month except December.

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May 27, 2019, 7 PM meeting: On the Wings of a Prayer, presented by Craig Marks.

A pictorial discussion of how butterfly wings, aside from flight, function in various capacities as defense mechanisms. The presentation will also address some evolutionary theory.

Bio: I was raised in Tennessee but have lived the last 45 years in the Acadiana region of Louisiana. I am an amateur lepidopterist, starting initially as a teenager, and then resuming the hobby again in the early 1990’s. With the help of several other amateur lepidopterists here in Louisiana, it took seven years of gathering data and visiting multiple locations around the State to complete “Butterflies of Louisiana, A Guide to Identification and Location.”

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June 24, 2019, 7 PM meeting: Wild Bees, presented by Paula Sharp & Ross Eatman.

Photojournalists Paula Sharp and Ross Eatman are the authors of the well-traveled and highly-regarded website Wild Bees of New York, the culmination of a three-year project documenting native bee species for New York’s state park system. Sponsored by the New York State Environmental Protection Fund, Wild Bees of New York provides information and detailed photographs of more than 120 species of native bees of the Northeastern United States.

Sharp and Eatman’s photographs of wild bees are currently on a national tour of prominent museums, art galleries and botanical gardens. An exhibit of Sharp & Eatman’s bee photographs will be featured by the Houston Museum of Natural Science from May 24 – September 22, 2019.

Beginning in September, 2018, Sharp and Eatman commenced a new project at the Texas National Butterfly Center in Mission. As part of this endeavor, Sharp and Eatman have erected a new website, Wild Bees of the National Butterfly Center, which documents the many novel and rare native bee species inhabiting the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

Sharp and Eatman will be continuing to research and photograph bee species of the National Butterfly Center and the Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the upcoming year. They will be speaking about their work and presenting a slideshow of dazzling photographs of wild bees, both northeastern and Texan. Sharp and Eatman will be available afterwards, to answer questions about their Texas project, bees of the Lower Rio Grande Valley and macro photography.