Vital butterfly and sun-moth monitoring continues — Can you help?

Monitoring butterflies is an enjoyable activity. And it doesn’t matter whether you are young or old, or whether you are familiar with your local species or not – everyone can participate. Over the last four months, NGT has been running survey and monitoring workshops to teach people about the benefits of monitoring and how to do it, and hopefully encourage more participation in butterfly and sun-moth surveys.

On numerous occasions, I have written posts about our wonderful insect fauna, especially butterflies and their relevance for long-term monitoring programs. One species in particular, the Marbled Xenica, is of particular interest as we’ve previously spoken about this butterfly and the population at Penambol Conservation Park behaving like ‘a canary in the coalmine‘. Its flight period and abundance each year seem closely aligned to increases and declines in rainfall. Note the chart below showing the abundance each year and how closely aligned it is to the annual rainfall received for that year. Note the compounding effect of the 2005 and 2006 below-average rainfall years (red) and how low the population was during that period (black).

This chart shows a lag in the recovery of Marbled Xenicas after a period of low rainfall but now also shows how they have returned to similar numbers from 20 years before. Phew… isn’t nature resilient. However, due to this data being tied to just one site in southern Australia we can’t be confident this is the case over other parts of Australia. Does anyone have any data that says otherwise for this species? We’d like to hear from you.

In parallel to gathering this data, NGT has been promoting and running training workshops in butterfly ID, survey and monitoring. With support from OneFortyOne and Butterfly Conservation SA Inc, these workshops have been run in the Mt Lofty Ranges, Limestone Coast, and western Victoria. the workshops have focussed on the species relevant to each district and to promote monitoring techniques which can be easily rolled out at a site you visit often, and to encourage surveys to be done multiple times a year and for multiple years. Do you think you’re up for it?

Our most recent workshop was held near Portland in western Victoria, where we filled the room with enthusiastic participants (thanks to Ruth Graney), young and old, and we talked and walked through a 25-year monitoring journey, and some of the interesting species and results. The Portland workshop also focussed on damp woodland species like Bright Copper, Silver, Striped and Ringed Xenicas, and even Bright-eyed Browns. All of which are rare species (in some parts of their range) and need our help.

The monitoring techniques involve transect walks and 15-minute area searches, and we practiced an area search outside the venue at Bolwarra, near Portland, and recorded six species including this spectacular White-banded Grass-dart (Taractrocera papyria) photographed by an amazing enthusiastic young entomologist, Raz. Other butterflies observed during our 15-minute area search included: Marbled Xenica, Cabbage White, Grass Blue, Common Brown, and Australian Painted Lady.

The Aldgate workshop (Mt Lofty Ranges) held on 10th January 2026, was well attended, and we thank the Hut Community Centre for the venue. During the field component we managed to see Ringed Xenica, which is a threatened species in the Adelaide Hills. We had a field excursion in Mark Oliphant Conservation Park, where we practiced the two techniques taught in the workshop (15-minute area count and a transect or Pollard Walk). Here is the group participating in a Pollard walk, while being distracted momentarily by the Ringed Xenica, which sat camouflaged as a leaf on the trail.

The Silver Xenica will be our focus soon as we get closer to autumn. We have attempted to translocate this species from near Dartmoor to two sites near Glencoe in 2018, but unfortunately no adults have been seen flying in SA sites since 2022. We aim to head out looking for them from mid-March in SA and western Vic, so please get in touch by emailing Bryan at if you’d like to come along and/or learn how to do a butterfly survey.

These activities are proudly supported by OneFortyOne, and Butterfly Conservation SA Inc.