How to Easily Catch a Butterfly with Your Hand: 6 Steps (2024)

FAQs

How do you catch a butterfly with your hands? ›

Slowly extend your open hand out towards the butterfly and hold your hand close to it. Once the butterfly is used to your hand being there, slightly push your hand under the butterfly's feet. The butterfly will step onto your fingers if it feels comfortable.

Most of the time, rangers will frown on you trying to catch butterflies in state or national parks, and in fact, some species are protected by state or federal law. Therefore, always check your local laws, and stick to your backyard or an area that's not protected.

Butterfly wings are covered with tiny scales, each a single color. Most of the colors are produced by pigments, but the beautiful iridescence of some butterflies results from a reflective microstructure on the scale's surface. Don't touch a butterfly's wing—the "powder" that rubs off is actually the scales.

There is a persistent belief that if you touch the wings of a moth or butterfly, it will lose the ability to fly, or even die. While it is important to be extremely gentle when petting a butterfly, the consequences are rarely so dramatic.

Butterflies are as fragile as memories, difficult to catch, impossible to preserve perfectly intact. If you go about it the wrong way, they lose their color, fall to pieces in your hands. Still, the impulse is there, when you see that quick flicker of color in the corner of your eye, to make a grab.

If the butterfly lands on your finger, it usually just wants some salt from your sweat. It will take some and then leave quickly. Any quick movement will generally scare it off. If you are holding a newly emerged butterfly, and it won't leave, it might be too cold to fly, or its wings might not be fully hardened yet.

Through the cloth of the insect net, grasp the body of the moth or butterfly with wings up. Squeeze the sides of the thorax quite vigorously with the thumb and forefinger for 2 to 3 seconds. This paralyzes the specimens temporarily so the net can be opened and the specimen lifted out without danger of damage or escape.

I have captured a butterfly near a water fall and eventually I released it. It will probably go to the window. You can hold up a towel and try herding it out the door, or if it sits quietly, pop a large clear jar over it carefully, slide a card over the opening, and take it outside.

Most adult butterflies live only one or two weeks, but some species hibernate during the winter and may live several months.

Wear brightly colored clothes. I have a bright yellow and orange tie-dyed shirt that always seems to lure butterflies to me. Smell sweet. If you're wearing a skin lotion or perfume that smells a bit like flowers, that attract a hungry butterfly.

Can butterflies land on you? ›

Sometimes butterflies, especially brushfooted and swallowtail butterflies, land on people (and other things) to get some of the salt from our skin or from the surface of one of the other salty things they land on..

It takes time, but once the butterfly lets its guard down, you can become friends quite naturally." " ... I come here every day, say hello to the butterflies, and talk about things with them. When the time comes, though, they just quietly go off and disappear.

A sturdy butterfly net is essential, and a spreading board, insect pins, and a display case are helpful tools for making a quality collection. To capture a butterfly with a net, move slowly until you are within range. Then quickly come down on it trapping it to the ground.

Butterfly adults generally feed only in the sun. If sun is limited in your landscape, try adding butterfly nectar sources to the vegetable garden. Plant for continuous bloom - Butterflies need nectar throughout the adult phase of their life span. Try to plant so that when one plant stops blooming, another begins.

Butterflies are as fragile as memories, difficult to catch, impossible to preserve perfectly intact. If you go about it the wrong way, they lose their color, fall to pieces in your hands. Still, the impulse is there, when you see that quick flicker of color in the corner of your eye, to make a grab.