The Butterfly Guy

You can call me "The Butterfly Guy."

Steve Andrews The Butterfly Guy in Lisbon

I am becoming known for being a “Butterfly Guy,” because I rear butterflies and share my achievements on social media. I also gave a talk on the subject of Butterfly Gardening to a gardening club in the Algarve a year or so back, and wrote about the subject for Mediterranean Gardening and Outdoor Living magazine. I have a song entitled Butterfly In My Beard and I recently bought a shirt with butterflies all over it. I thought it would be a great public image to have and helps show my love for these amazing insects. Butterfly In My Beard has the lyrics: “They called me a Bugman on the news one time…” and this makes reference to when I was once featured in the South Wales Echo and given this title in a story about how I kept exotic insects.

Bugman Steve Andrews in the South Wales Echo

I first discovered the joys of helping butterflies and moths when I was a little boy and have been doing what I can to help them all my life since then. I used to keep caterpillars in jam-jars, feeding them whatever they needed, watching them transform into a chrysalis or pupa in a cocoon, and then await the day they emerged as a magnificent butterfly or moth. There’s a twofold pleasure gained from rearing a butterfly or moth from egg to adult. First of all there is the joy of seeing the amazing insect in all its glory on its first day as a winged insect, and secondly there is the pride you experience from knowing you helped.

Swallowtails and Monarchs

Swallowtail on my hand

Since I have been living in Portugal I have been rearing Monarch Butterflies (Danaus plexippus) and Swallowtails (Papilio machaon). I find it easy to do and would encourage other people to have a got at helping the butterflies in your area. You just need to grow the plants they need for their caterpillars and provide some flowering plants to provide nectar for the adults.

Female Monarch

Monarch female laying eggs on Milkweed

I grow Tropical Milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) for the Monarchs and Rue (Ruta graveolens) for the Swallowtails. I have also grown Balloonplant (Gomphocarpus fruticosus) for the Monarchs, and it is a better plant because it grows much bigger. It is also naturalised in some parts of Portugal so is a food source for the caterpillars of the Monarch Butterfly that can be found here. Sadly last winter killed mine plants of it, though my Tropical Milkweeds made it through. 

Tropical Milkweed

Last year I had four generations of Monarchs with on average 30 butterflies eclosing from their chrysalises each time. It has been the same this year and at the time of writing I have about that number of caterpillars here. This will be the last brood for the year. I am running out of plants that still have enough leaves and flowers on them to feed all the hungry larvae and some of the small ones in the garden are going to perish because there is simply not enough food for them. This is a common problem for anyone who goes in for helping the Monarchs. You need to grow a lot of their food-plants. I tend to keep the caterpillars indoors in sandwich boxes or especially prepared large empty plastic water-bottles.

Monarch caterpillars pupating

The latter container I slice through around the middle for easy access, and this can be taped over with sticky tape. I put some tissue in the bottom to catch the frass. I use this method of looking after the caterpillars because I have observed that wasps are a very serious predator that will take away all the larvae they can find on a plant. 

Swallowtails just keep on breeding throughout the year with butterflies flying in every month apart from December and January. They make it through in the chrysalis stage, which remains dormant through the coldest months. Like the female Monarchs, the female Swallowtails return to the garden here because it is somewhere they can lay their eggs. Fortunately for the Swallowtail, Rue is a commonly grown garden plant here. They will also use Fennel and Wild Carrot, but in my experience the caterpillars do not like changing from one plant to another. Where I live most of the Swallowtails are depending on the Rue in local gardens because the Fennel growing wild doesn’t do well in the droughts we have had and loses all its foliage.

The Moths too

Death's-head Hawk-moth

This year, I reared some Death’s-head Hawk-moths (Acherontia atropos) too. I must admit I got the eggs from Worldwide Butterflies, because although I have seen lots of photos and videos of caterpillars of this species shared on social media groups about nature in Portugal, I have not come across them in the town where I live. I used to live in Tenerife and the Death’s-head was a common moth there. I used to find the massive caterpillars on Thornapple (Datura stramonium) and Lantana (Lantana camara). This is a moth species that is lucky to have a very wide range of food-plants, unlike many species that only have a limited range of plants their caterpillars can eat.

Death's-head Hawk caterpillar

I fed my caterpillars on Potato and Privet, which are two of the alternative food sources for the larvae of this magnificent species. This moth gets its name from the marking like a skull on the back of its thorax. It can also squeak and is a very strange but beautiful creature. Unlike its caterpillars, which can eat many types of plant, the adult Death’s-head may have difficulty finding suitable food because it has a very short proboscis. One food it can eat, however, is honey, and this is why it is compelled to enter and rob beehives.

When I lived in the UK I used to keep various moth caterpillars there. I had a lot of success with the Poplar Hawk (Laothoe populi) and Eyed Hawk-moth (Smerinthus ocellatus). I grew a small Sallow tree in the garden and this attracted the female moths. Getting back to butterflies, at the same time in the UK, I had Small Tortoiseshell (Aglais urticae) and Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta) caterpillars on a patch of Stinging Nettles (Urtica dioica) I had growing. 

That is all you really need to do: grow plants that the caterpillars of butterflies and moths need as food, and provide food for the adults by growing flowers and flowering shrubs. I have Zinnias and a Buddleia/Butterfly Bush (Buddleia davidii), as two of the main attractions for butterflies and moths as sources of nectar. Feed the caterpillars and feed the adult insects and you will have success at helping moths and butterflies.

Monarch on Zinnia