Two of our favourite school subjects… art and nature study are wonderfully complimentary… we spent last month exploring more about butterflies in our region
And we used this book from Struik Nature as our guide…
Field Guide to Butterflies of South Africa Second Edition
This book is a fantastic addition to our Struik Nature Guide Collection. Field Guides form the back bone of our nature study… and this Second Edition, Field Guide to Butterflies of South Africa is, as you would expect packed with all the information that we could ever need to know about our local butterflies.
It contains information of 671 species of butterfly, photographs of both the male and female of the species…
And a reference page full of photographs of the early stages of a butterfly: eggs, larva and pupa, as a useful identification guide.
The introduction includes the life cycle of the butterfly, as well as the different biomes of South Africa. Tips to help with identifying butterflies… and then the books wastes no time in diving into pages and pages of beautiful butterfly identification facts… each with a distribution map, latin and common name, wingspan, distinctive notes, habitat, and such like.
Observing Butterflies…
We started by looking at butterflies that we have found and added to our nature collection previously…
And we observed several butterflies on our latest hikes and adventures.
You can see our tips for Gardening with Butterflies and our Nature Notebooking in this post here.
Creating Butterflies using the Field Guide
Everyone chose a butterfly that they wanted to create… and then got to know their particular butterfly really well. The information in the field guide was invaluable and the exceptional photographs really make this book an outstanding field guide.
We tipped out a jar of old electrical bits and bobs onto a tray…
And with wire, we created butterfly bodies…
More wire…
And paints…
And wings were added…
Using the Field Guide as a Reference…
And now we have a lovely collection of butterflies to hang up and enjoy…
Amazon Affiliate Links for the Books in this Post
The book we used for this blog post is the Second Edition of The Field Guide to Butterflies of South Africa. But I could only find the First Edition on Amazon.
As with most Struik Nature Field Guides there is an associated app, which is so useful.
This book was given to us for review purposes by Penguin Random House South Africa and Struik Nature. This is not a sponsored post and opinions expressed are entirely our own.