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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Oct. 28, 2019, 7 PM meeting: Pollinators in grasslands: habitat requirements and management, presented by Dr. Elinor Lichtenberg.

Grasslands provide habitat for diverse flower-visiting insects, but are highly threatened by human activities (e.g., urbanization, invasive grasses, disrupted fire regimes). In order to understand how various activities might affect pollinators – both negatively and positively – we need a better understanding of how pollinator communities respond to multiple aspects of grassland habitat. This talk will discuss habitat requirements of bees and other pollinators. It will also describe ongoing research on how grassland restoration impacts pollinator communities.

Dr. Elinor Lichtenberg is currently a postdoc in Shalene Jha’s lab at UT Austin, and is starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas in 2020. Her research focuses on plant-pollinator interactions, including animal behavior and community ecology. Elinor’s interest in pollinators grew out of her doctoral research on communication by tropical stingless bees (UC San Diego). She has since studied topics such as nectar robbing behavior, and how various land management practices impact pollinator communities. Elinor has become increasingly interested in how such activities affect pollinators with different life histories and resource requirements.

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Nov. 25, 2019, 7 PM meeting: Member's Show & Tell.

This is a fun meeting that we have every year. Any member can show their favorite photos of the year or to tell about their a trip or butterfly experience. You have 5-10 minutes. There will be a projector and laptop so just bring your flash drive. Plus, the club provides pizza for this year end meeting! If you plan to participate contact .