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For two weeks in early November 2012, a small group of us
focused almost
exclusively on seeing the incredible variety of butterflies in the area around
Tena, Ecuador. It took quite a bit of work for several weeks after our return
going through the more than 2500 pictures that made it home with me, deleting
the really bad ones and duplicates, deciding which to keep, cleaning up the remainder,
and then trying to figure out just what species they are among the several hundred we
saw during the trip of the thousands that are found there.
Our trip was organized by Sunstreak Tours and led by the extraordinary
Andrew Neild. Included in our group of ten
was the quite knowledgeable owner of Sunstreak Tours (and overall butterfly expert), Jeff Glassberg. With the
expertise of the two of them, we were able to find and identify an amazing number of
species during the trip. Based out of the comfortable
Hostal Casa del Abuelo on the outskirts of Tena,
each day we'd head off in search of butterflies and
return that evening having seen something exceptional every day. This overview page has pictures of some of the things we encountered other
than butterflies on what was a wonderful and quite productive trip.
Jeff, Andrew, my friend Rebecca, and after the trip, Kim Garwood
and Keith Wilmott were an incredible great help with identifying the
butterflies. I also relied on several online sources to figure out some of them
and am fairly confident about most of the identifications, but there are certainly errors
for some of them, which will be corrected as they are brought to my attention.
An Excel spreadsheet has a complete list of the butterflies in order of presentation with some
additional information on observation dates and locations. Some of
the more useful online sources included:
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