Big Backyard Butterfly Count

Part of I ❤️ Butterflies Week

February 2025

I'm lucky that the monarchs that arrived in my garden not long ago have stuck around, just in time for the New Zealand Big Backyard Butterfly Count, run by the Moths and Butterflies Trust of New Zealand with technology and support from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. The first survey was 2024, back in the old garden. With this butterfly garden so new, I hope that this year will be a starting point for building the numbers for future counts.

The first monarch sunning itself on a mapou tree on the edge of the bush area

The idea is you sit for 15 minutes and record the highest number of butterflies of each species you see in that time. It's a lovely excuse to sit in the sun and enjoy the garden if nothing else. With so much work to do both on the house and in the garden, I haven't just sat in the garden for some time.

Before the count started I spotted a cabbage white in what will probably be forever called the sundial garden, a small space at the side of the house, which you have to go through to get to the boardwalk to the bush, lawn and butterfly garden. I replaced the sundial early on with an urn filled with trailing lantana I had grown from stolen cuttings, so it should really be called the ill-gotten gains garden, but I think sundial garden will probably stick.

Cabbage whites were the only butterflies in the garden for a long time

It didn't make it to the butterfly garden for the count, but fortunately the monarchs visited during the 15 minutes I was surveying. Phew! The survey uses an app on your phone, developed in the UK for use in tracking butterfly and moth populations across Europe. They have created a new database for New Zealand species and the app - Butterfly Count - has clear photos of our most common butterflies to help with identification. Unfortunately the programming did not allow for the surveys to be submitted ahead of UK time, and I kept getting an error message. When they did go in, the times and dates displayed were wrong. I am afraid that this will make the dataset unusable for some analysis. The 2024 survey did not suffer from the same issue so I presume its fixable for 2026.

The second monarch on tropical milkweed

Having surveyed my garden on the first weekend of I ❤️ Butterflies week, I decided I would go and survey a more established garden. I work a short walk away from Auckland Domain, home to Auckland War Memorial Museum and the Wintergardens.

I love the Wintergardens. The Victorian glasshouses are something to see in their own right and whilst budgets are forever squeezed, the gardening team here manage to put on a wonderful display of plants year round. Along the sunny side of the complex is a deep, English style border and this was the space I surveyed during my lunchtime on Valentine's Day, or I "heart" Butterflies Day, according to the Moths and Butterflies Trust.

The herbaceous border at the Wintergardens within Auckland Domain

I spent 15 minutes walking up and down the border, looking for movement. I really appreciated all the flowers and it was clear thought had been put into the repeating colours and cascading plant heights. I will need to come back for ideas to expand my own borders, although this one is too deep for me to be able to maintain. It's definitely stately home proportioned.

A long-tailed blue butterfly in the Wintergardens border

Something flew over the hedge as I started the count, so I could only identify it generally as a blue, but fortunately the software allows for these general IDs as well as specific species. I also saw this lovely, if tatty, long-tailed blue in the border. The Wintergardens sit like an oasis within large areas of lawn and playing fields, so whilst the flowers are a great nectar source, there are no food plants for caterpillars or nearby garden beds that would bring more butterflies in. Still, it was great to see the blues, as they haven't really been in my garden yet.

After the count was over, I treated myself to a visit inside the Wintergardens glasshouses and to the pond and fernery within the complex. Then it was back to work! I look forward to hearing how the count went overall. I imagine there are still small numbers of participants, but the Garden Bird Survey started out small and that has grown into a large New Zealand citizen science project, so hopefully the butterfly count will build in the same way.