A free field guide to the butterflies of Borneo — 672 species, each with photographs, scientific name, and the reserves where it has been recorded. Nothing to buy, nothing to sign up for.
What Borneo's butterfly list looks like
The species everyone hopes for is Rajah Brooke's Birdwing, a large black-and-iridescent-green swallowtail named after Sarawak's first White Rajah and one of the most photographed insects on the island. Around it sits the rest of the swallowtail and birdwing family (Papilionidae), the whites and yellows (Pieridae), and two much larger groups that make up most of the real list: the brush-footed butterflies (Nymphalidae) and the small, fast blues, coppers and hairstreaks (Lycaenidae).
Where and when to find them
Unlike most of the rest of this guide, butterflies are a daytime, full-sun activity. Forest edges, riverbanks and clearings in the mid-morning are the most productive. The single best trick is a damp sandbank or muddy puddle after rain — swallowtails, in particular, gather there in numbers to drink minerals, a behaviour called mud-puddling, and it is often the closest view you will get of a species that spends the rest of its time high in the canopy.
Using this instead of a book
This is free, photographic, and searchable from a phone at a riverbank, which most of the specialist Bornean lepidoptera literature is not. See also the combined Insects of Borneo guide and their night-flying relatives, the moths. There is a fuller comparison of this guide against printed ones on the field guide page.
All 672 species
Each card has two colour-coded toggles:
turns lime green — adds it to your trip planner
marks it as seen in my sightings
