After photographing butterflies in Cusco (and elsewhere!) for over a decade, I decided to put my collection online as a way of sharing what I've learned. I don't pretend to have learned everything - each time in the field, I encounter new species, or old species in new places, and find new questions about identification, distribution, or behaviour. A few brief recommendations before you start browsing my collection:

The layout is designed to look best with your web browser set to occupy half your computer screen. This is intentional - one main motivation for the project is to help people identify their own butterfly pictures; you can browse this site on half the screen and put your picture on the other half for easy comparison.

Each picture is bordered on the right by a coloured line. A green line indicates that I am fairly confident that it is correctly identified; a yellow line means I have significant doubts; if you see a red line, there's a good chance the identification isn't correct.

The maps are individually and manually created for each species. I don't have the technical expertise to do better, and anyway it's a fun component of the project. The red dots represent approximately where I have photographed the species; the pink area indicated where I'm confident it occurs, and red question marks indicate where it might occur but I have no evidence that it does.

If you are looking for a specific species or genus, you might want to do a search on the Master List page. Butterfly taxonomy is in a constant state of flux, so try searching for just the species epiphet if you're having trouble finding something.

If you have butterfly photographs you would like to contribute, please get in touch with me by email at david@mariposabutterflytours.com.

Click here to go to the first genus page, or here to go back to the homepage.