It was my daughter’s 13th birthday, and we wanted to do something unique and “earthly” 🙂  After a lot of research, my wife narrowed it down to a customised nature walk at Turahalli Forest. I had heard about the abundance of butterflies at Turahalli before, and was looking forward to our trip. Turahalli is at driving distance within Bangalore city limits. Apart from my teenager, we had 5 other girls in the car … you can imagine the scene at 6 AM on a Sunday morning 🙂 Thankfully it was a Sunday morning, we made it there really quick.
Our guide for the day was Mr. Madhusudhan Shukla. He arrived in an orange coloured sporty car along with another person (his nephew, I think?). From the very beginning, I could sense how passionate Madhu was. I discovered later that he is into multiple fields of interest.
There was a walking trail that very soon became a slight upward slope. Madhu started pointing at various insects that we would have otherwise ignored. While we started butterflies soon, a bulk of these were found around a bushy area around the mid-point of our path. By the end of our trail, I was adept at spotting them. Amazingly, they were almost everywhere! The best time to catch them is early morning. Many of these butterflies seem to like catching the early morning sun, and would happily spread their wings facing the sunlight.
They had arranged for butterfly sticker chart for each of the girls. It is a product by Birdwing Publishers, a publishing enterprise of Ladybird Environmental Consulting.  Thanks to that, I could identify most of the common varieties. For others, I have searched on Google images and got the most likely name. In case there are any errors, please correct in the comments.
There is a lot more that we saw. However, I wanted to dedicate this post only to butterflies. Let me do a different one on other interesting insects, birds, trees and other “earthly” things we saw and learnt.
Addendum: Here is the link to the next post –Â http://hobbycue.com/activity/travel/nature-at-turahalli/