MANGALURU: Big Butterfly Month: India 2020, a first of its kind, will witness butterfly experts, enthusiasts, and organizations from across India, join hands for a month-long event.
Various activities such as big butterfly count, butterfly online workshops, butterfly gardening workshops, and contests on butterfly photography, butterfly journaling, butterfly quiz, butterfly videography
, and butterfly lifecycle, will be conducted from September 5 to 20. Butterfly origami and webinars on butterflies for school and colleges will also be conducted on a virtual platform, in keeping with the current Covid-19 scenario.
The big butterfly count would be held from September 14 to 20 and participants are encouraged to log in their submissions into citizen science digital platforms: Butterflies of India, iNaturalist, and India Biodiversity
The celebration would also include competitions and institutional outreach programmes through virtual media educating and sensitizing people about butterflies. Such programs will be conducted in all the major cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Dehradun
, Ahmedabad, Guwahati, Jammu, and Chennai, as well as reach out to protected areas around central India, Himalaya and the northeastern states of our country.
Butterflies play a vital role in the ecosystem. The Big Butterfly Month aims to bring the citizens of the country together under the umbrella of butterfly lovers to preserve the current habitat and to build new habitats for butterflies.
Probably for the first time, more than 30 organisations working in the field of Biodiversity and its conservation have come together towards the common goal of involving citizens in large scale monitoring programs. Sohail Madan
from Bombay Natural History Society
(BNHS) said that the exercise may help bridge the gap between knowledge and implementation and provide the participants with a platform to learn about butterflies, their behavior, habitat, and conservation approaches.
Prof. Krushnamegh Kunte of NCBS, said “New information and large datasets are powerful not only in advancing our scientific understanding of the biology of butterflies but also in planning conservation action so that we are able to perpetuate India’s legacy of unparalleled biodiversity. Our combined efforts so far to survey butterflies in India’s biodiversity hotspots and to monitor butterfly populations in areas of Bengaluru and Delhi need to be scaled up across India. Along with this, outreach initiatives such as the Big Butterfly Month will produce a citizenry well-educated in the matters of nature and the environment who, we hope, will work towards protecting and creating butterfly habitats.”