This follows on from my article on Pollard Walks .

We don’t have to venture further than our gardens to appreciate nature. We increasingly plant indigenous in our gardens. We support our local conservancies to develop parks, roadsides, and riversides to function as refuges and corridors for wildlife which can then find your garden. This is particularly so in my home city of Durban where organisations like Kloof Conservancy are working hard to support municipal efforts to protect and promote biodiversity, like the D’MOSS (Durban Municipal Open Spaces System).

Gardening for butterflies is not difficult to do. Like birds they need food and shelter. They are different to birds in that the food used by the adults is different to that used by the young (that is, caterpillars!) Adult butterflies mostly need nectar sources in the form of flowers. Caterpillars eat plants, which worries some gardeners, but with a change in mindset you can get past this. A few butterflies (and moths’) caterpillars can defoliate (strip) plants, but most rely on camouflage to avoid predators. Like birds. Many of them avoid leaving evidence of leaf eating. That is a clue birds can read when hunting for food. Much of the time you wouldn’t know the caterpillars are there at all.

There is a section on garden butterflies on this website.

Pollard Walks work best when you have a large site to work with, like a park or a nature reserve. They should be about a kilometre long and would normally take an hour or two to walk. Few of us have big enough gardens or the luxury of time to do Pollard Walks in them. Fortunately, the eBMS scheme has an option to suit the gardener – the ’15-minute timed count’. This is described here.

The UK and European versions of the app have photo guides to the butterflies found there, but the South African version is still under construction.

A guidebook such as the Field Guide to Butterflies of South Africa, or an app such as Woodhall’s Butterflies of South Africa, can help you identify the species and understand where it fits within the butterfly families. These resources should help you make a reasonable identification, but it is useful to have a way to confirm it. iNaturalist is one of the best platforms for confirming butterfly identifications.

Photographing butterflies and getting them identified is easier than ever. A computer and a modern smartphone are usually enough; you do not need an expensive mirrorless or DSLR camera, although one can help with close-up shots.

iNaturalist has useful information on how to register and upload your photos. It makes identification quicker if you have a reasonable idea of what you saw, because it has a great community of identifiers who would find your pictures more easily if you tagged them with an identification. You can also tag me, @stevewoodhall, and I will get a notification that you need some help or a confirmation of an identification.

iNaturalist has over the years built a massive database of all living things on Earth, South Africa included. At the time of writing this (late June 2026) South Africa had over 7 million records of which over 150 000 are butterflies.