Summer Project Spotlight: Butterflies of The Ridges Sanctuary

The following is a Summer Project completed by Heidi Williamson, 2024 Summer Naturalist at The Ridges Sanctuary. Heidi is a college student from Tulsa, Oklahoma attending Texas A&M University. She is working toward a degree in Ecology & Conservation Biology. She is passionate about wildlife conservation and helping people discover and experience the natural world around us.

There are many summers on a warm sunny day, when the light flutter of butterfly wings can be seen. The Ridges Sanctuary provides a great habitat for these colorful insects. Between the open meadows, wooded trails, and soggy swales, butterflies can be seen all over the property. It can be challenging to sneak up close enough to snap a picture, and how would you know where to begin when deciding what kind of butterfly you saw? 

“Butterflies of The Ridges Sanctuary” was created by Heidi Williamson during her time as a Summer Naturalist at The Ridges Sanctuary. The field guide is a product of her summer project as she documented butterfly species through walking surveys and fruit traps. She hopes that it can be a useful guide to identify butterflies found in the Ridges. There are 29 species featured in the guide, all photographed by Ridges staff members. It is not a comprehensive guide, but rather a starting place for butterfly species identification and documentation. 

How the guide works

Butterfly species are grouped based on their phylogenetic relationships, that is, how they are categorized by scientists based on how species are related to each other evolutionarily. At the top of each page is the common name for the group the butterflies on that page belong to. Some groups need multiple pages, in these cases, the group name is listed on all pages for that group. Conversely, some species groups are small enough to share a page. In this case, there are multiple group names per page. On each page typically four species are pictured along with their common name and species name underneath. 

Read the Butterflies of The Ridges Sanctuary guide by Heidi Williamson below: