Butterfly Girl - Prachi Singh | Unleash with FTEM

Why does the Butterfly Matter?

As one of the most popular insects, the butterfly is often associated with beauty and nature. However, there is more to these creatures than meets the eye. Butterflies are an important part of the ecosystem and help to keep the environment healthy. They are essential for pollination and play a crucial role in the life cycle of plants. Butterflies also provide food for other animals, such as birds, which helps to maintain the balance of the ecosystem. By preserving butterflies, we are also preserving the health of the ecosystem.

As part of the next episode of Unleash With FTEM (From The Experts Mouth) series, we present excerpts of this conversation between Prachi Singh and Manasi Srivastava. Prachi is a Chartered Accountant by profession and a lepidopterist and conservationist by passion. She has been working towards creating and conserving butterfly habitats for almost two decades, and has been recognized in the Limca Book Record for her efforts. You can watch the video of the full conversation as part of ‘Unleash With FTEM’ series on our YouTube channel, and the video is also embedded towards the end of this post.

The journey from chasing butterflies to being a conservationist

I remember I was in 4^th or 5^th standard when I first read about the butterfly lifecycle and I wanted to explore and see it on my own how it happens. That’s when I saw a caterpillar in my garden, brought it home and observed its entire lifecycle.

Then I used to invite my friends and relatives to my house and show the entire lifecycle to them. Since it was so fascinating for me as a child to study how tiny caterpillars would grow into beautiful butterflies, I thought that I had to educate the world. I started visiting the NGOs and schools and started talking about very basic things about butterflies and how the schools and NGOs themselves can help towards conservation and save some species

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The optimal environment needed for the butterfly habitat

A lot of people I meet and the schools I go to often mention that they would want to visit my home. Whenever they come they like the environment and they say, “we also have similar plants at home! Why don’t we have butterflies?” They probably expect something very different and unique, or have some hybrid or exotic plants and I tell them that they should have more native plants and flowering plants and at the same time they should know which plants to grow. For example, when they looked at the curry plant in my garden they said, “curry plant everybody has, but we have never seen a caterpillar or a butterfly around”. I asked them, “do you add pesticides?” To which they said, “of course!” My response was- “then why would a butterfly come? Caterpillars die because of insecticides and pesticides”.

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau

It is important to know which kind of plants butterflies prefer. For example, every butterfly has its own choice of plant on which it lays eggs. Plants like Lemon, Orange, Bel Patra, Curry, Ashoka.

These are some of the plants butterflies choose to lay their eggs on. So you can grow them in your garden without adding any pesticide or insecticide. And then, flowers are very important and we should try to have a variety of flowers of different sizes. Another important element here is, have compound flowers, flowers that have florets, for example, Marigold. It is not one flower; it is a combination of multiple small flowers.

How to naturally keep pests and insects away from the plants

You will be surprised to know. The other day I brought a flowering plant called Lxora, Even before the buds came, there were so many insects and pests around it. We were also very worried and my mom was looking for ways to get rid of them without even telling me. She knew I was not going to allow her to use any pesticides.

What I say is, when I see a pest around, I bring in a caterpillar of a ladybird. So I did the same, brought in a caterpillar from the other plant in my garden and placed it on the leaf of Lxora and it ate all the pests. I am sure you won’t be able to find the caterpillars around that easily, but let me tell you nature has its own way to manage and tackle. If you leave the plant there, you might see black colour caterpillars around eating those pests. Don’t worry, nature will have a way around it. If you leave your garden undisturbed, it will benefit a lot.

When I wake up and see a leaf eaten in my garden, I get excited that there is a caterpillar around. I see it from a different lens. The thought that that plant is taken by a butterfly; it’s her home, gives me a lot of contentment and the leaf being eaten doesn’t disturb me anymore.

Garden Tour

I am right now sitting in my garden and over the weekend, this is the place you will always find me in. We have about 130-140 potted plants in our garden. We include a lot of these as the butterfly host and nectar, I can attract more and more butterflies to my garden.

The plants that you see in the background are Petunias. They are usually grown in winters and we have planted a lot of them. Now, you can place them together in one place because when butterflies drink nectar, they can’t change plants very quickly. So if they are drinking the nectar of one petunia, they would like their next plant to be a Petunia; they take time to change their flower. If you place the plants separately, it will be a task for them to look around. Every season we keep changing and including more flowers for that particular season. I think it’s very important to include native flowers and plants because exotic ones may look very beautiful, but they consume more water.

Butterflies like flowers such as Oriental Lantanas which are compound flowers, with multiple florets. Another plant that I have is Madaar or Ark. Many people think this is probably poisonous and not many like it in their homes. This is the plant where the orange colour butterfly called Plain Tiger lays eggs.

Here is a leaf of a Bryophyllum. It is very easy to grow. All you have to do is take one leaf and it will have multiple little leaves sprouting on it. What I do is, whenever I visit my friends or a school, I just pluck one leaf, give it to them and ask them to place it in their garden and they’d grow up into 10-15 more plants. When you take a closer look at the Bryophyllum leaf, you can also see a pupa shell here from which the butterfly has come out.

So the butterfly will look for its own host plant, will lay its eggs there, the caterpillar will eat the leaf and will stay there throughout its life and will put itself in a shell called pupa and after a week from becoming a pupa, the butterfly will automatically come out and fly. This is what happens in my garden every now and then; different species laying eggs, becoming butterflies and I carefully watch them. That’s all that I do. I am very excited every morning to look for new caterpillars in my garden and wait for them to become butterflies and capture some pictures if I get lucky.

Kinds of Butterfly Species

I have had about 11-12 species in my garden. In Delhi, we have about 100 species whereas in India we have 1300 species and in the world over 15000. It depends upon the kind of plants you have in your garden.

Maintaining a butterfly garden in places with poor Air Quality Index and extreme weather conditions

It is very easy to maintain a garden if you have native plants. All the plants which were originally grown in India will survive the heat and the harsh winters that we have in Delhi. So, if you have more plants that are native, you will tend to spend less time looking after them.

The other thing is, do not flood your plant with water; you need to understand the basics of watering. For example, the Petunias in my garden do not require much water. If you give more water than what is required, probably the roots will die. One must have the basic knowledge about the plants they keep in their gardens. It’s a good practice to ask the nursery the precautionary measures to protect the plants you’re buying from them.

I also feel that we need to spend more time in the garden. Every time before spring is when the flowers bear seeds. I spend a lot of time in my garden collecting these seeds. When these seeds fall on the ground and if they go unnoticed and trashed, they will go wasted. You may get seeds of different flowers, even, for example, Marigold; once it flowers, the flower can be dried and grown into a new plant. So rather than buying plants you can grow and share with your friends and it’s much cheaper to have. I collect the seeds and use them for the next season.

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Seed balls that grow into plants that butterflies love

I create beautiful seed balls. It’s in the shape of a butterfly. It’s made of only mud and a little paper mache and I place one seed inside each of these. It then becomes a seed bomb. My mom then stitches some fancy pouches from recycled clothes, and I keep the seeds inside them and gift them to my friends or when I am travelling or going to the office I just throw them out in open areas so that when it rains, the seeds can grow into plants and trees and butterflies can lay their eggs. These are a few habits that one can inculcate for their own butterfly gardens. People share that the flowers in their garden do not have seeds. It’s probably because even before you realise, seeds are fallen or carried away by the wind.

About her book – Curious Coco

A list of a lot of butterfly hosts and nectar plants is there on the internet. I have written a book called Curious Coco for children. It has a list of all the plants which are easily available in India. These are very basic plants that you can have in your garden, and as I said, you need to know which plants to have, how much to water them, and how much sunlight they need. There are some plants such as these Petunias that don’t need harsh sunlight. I have put them in a little shaded area.

I realize that children still have that curiosity in them. When you talk to an adult about butterflies, their first question is, “ok how can we make money out of butterfly rearing or nurturing and then I say, “sorry then you’re not my target audience because that’s not what I am teaching”.

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Related Read: The Power of Curiosity

I have been visiting schools and NGOs for the last 7 or 8 years and not a single child has ever asked me that. So my target audience is mainly children. I thought there are so many books available that talk about the lifecycle of a butterfly; I wanted to really write something that talks about other terms such as “mud puddling”, which plants can they actually grow and why they need a butterfly garden, the defence mechanism of the butterflies. Everybody knows that butterflies can’t really bite. So how do they really save themselves? Basically, all those things that I had to spend a lot of time researching about so I thought I would put all of it in a handy book that would not just talk about the lifecycle of a butterfly but a lot more.

I feel very lucky that WWF India accepted my request to collaborate. They helped me research some terminologies I wasn’t well versed with and we included a lot of illustrations. For example, this one talks about moulting, the process in which one caterpillar changes into a second and sheds its skin to grow in size. The book talks about the species, the various types and classifications of butterflies. This book is an attempt to introduce children to know more about butterflies in detail.

The reason why butterfly wings have vibrant colours and patterns

Few butterflies are very bright in colour. In nature, we generally say that anything that is bright-coloured is toxic in nature. It’s mainly to scare the other predators – birds, lizards etc. to warn them and tell them, “I have toxins inside, so beware!” Also, you will see some male butterflies vibrant in colour and that is to attract their female counterparts.

There is a species called the Danaid Eggfly. The male is black and the female bright orange. Now what it does is it mimics other species of butterfly, for example, a Plain Tiger, which is toxic; because Danaid Eggfly itself is not poisonous so it mimics a toxic butterfly. So the bird will think, “okay this appears to be a plain Tiger and I have eaten a Plain Tiger before which was toxic. I better stay away!” That’s how butterflies use their colours to confuse their predators and save themselves.

Another interesting fact that I really love is that there are some butterflies that have big circular spots on them. If you see them from distance, they look like that of a big animal.

The spots on them look like the eyes of some big animal. So it is to confuse the predators that “I am not a butterfly but a big mammal and you can’t really eat me up! Stay away or I will attack you”!

Observations During Lockdown

I saw my garden through a different lens in lockdown. Although I was already spending a lot of time in my garden, I always preferred to go out, to Sunder Nursery, and Lodhi Garden to look for more species. I thought in my garden there were few but not many. When I started spending more time in my garden, I saw species like Tawny Coster which is not easily seen. I saw that species for the first time in my garden. The beauty of nature is that it is always accessible and one doesn’t have to go anywhere special to see it. So during the lockdown, our gardener wasn’t visiting us and so the weeds weren’t being plucked out. And a lot of species of butterflies need weeds to grow. Our garden was thus a little messy but I could see more butterflies and more insects.

There were people in my colony who now wanted to have their balcony garden or terrace garden as they had more time to spend and have a greener place of their own. That’s when they started contacting me saying they can’t visit the nursery but needed to add more plants. So all the seeds that I had, I sowed them, grew them into plants and distributed them free of cost. We planted around 40-50 plants and gave them away. And that’s become a culture now. I did that last year and this year also I plan to do it. My neighbours started saving used curd plastic jars, cleaned them and gave them to us to plant the saplings. So we would plant saplings in them and then give them away. We didn’t have to spend anything at all on the growing packs.

I convinced the management at my residential society to have a small butterfly garden in the park that we have in our premises and everybody contributed and we have converted one section into a butterfly garden.

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Striking a fine balance between profession and passion

My job is a little challenging; it consumes a lot of time but weekends are when I dedicate myself to work. Every weekend I spend time in my garden, even if it is just 10 minutes. Weekends are generally when I spend a lot of time reading, travelling and learning more and more.

During the lockdown, even corporates realized that one has to have a passion, and ways to keep the employees sane. My employer, Ernst & Young came up with hobby clubs such as photography, nature and a lot more. They realized that employees can be made to work 24*7 but they need to have a hobby of their own and that’s when they started recognizing people. That’s also how I got a little more time to pursue my passion during weekdays. I visit schools during their morning assembly time at 7 or 8 AM and then resume office and compensate for that one hour in the evening. So, yes, it does become a little hectic. Forums such as yours (FTEM) make people like us realize we are doing a good job and keep us motivated.

My parents have been very supportive. It was a common interest that we all had so that made it easy. Secondly, when I started inviting kids to my home, they started appreciating and said, “oh we never knew this”. That was something like an eye-opener both for them and myself. I realized I was doing something to add some knowledge and value to someone.

Perhaps the answer is that it is necessary to slow down, finally giving up on economistic fanaticism and collectively rethink the true meaning of the word wealth. Wealth does not mean a person who owns a lot but refers to someone who has enough time to enjoy what nature and human collaboration place within everyone’s reach. If the great majority of people could understand this basic notion, if they could be liberated from the competitive illusion that is impoverishing everyone’s life, the very foundations of capitalism, would start to crumble.
Franco Berardi

Achievements

I won the Limca Book Record for two consecutive years 2020 and 2021. It was given to me for nurturing the maximum species of butterflies in India. To be very honest, it did give me a lot of recognition, a lot of people wanted to work with me, and schools wanted to invite me because it’s really fancy to say, “we have a Limca Book Record holder with us”. But that was never an idea; I didn’t really want a lot of publicity through this recognition but it did send a signal that whatever I do, I know my work.

It was a very proud moment when I received that certificate, announcing me as a record holder. It probably helped me tell my coworkers that see I have been recognized. I should do something about it. It gave me a recognition at home to say that maybe monetary wise I won’t be recognized but probably even they (my family) acknowledge that I do something different and I should continue. And the most important is that I tell myself that I am creating some difference that I should continue and that people want me to do it. The recognition helped me realise that I probably may not be doing the best thing in the world, but I ain’t doing a bad job either and that I should continue to do what I do.

Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.
R. Buckminster Fuller

Every garden, a butterfly garden!

We built a butterfly park for our residential colony and converted a balcony at the Lalit Hotel in Faridabad into a butterfly garden. The idea was to have events such as ‘Breakfast with Butterflies” where people could have food at the hotel and get introduced to the fascinating journey of the butterflies but then lockdown happened and now I will revisit and see where we are on that.

Then I undertook a project for Noida sector 16. There is an army colony where we discussed which plants to add. My idea is that every garden should be a butterfly garden. We don’t need any fancy space to have one. So I want more and more people to contact me so that I can help them create a butterfly garden in their very surroundings.

Workshops and other initiatives

I do workshops with schools every now and then. Right now, it’s virtual. I have collaborated with an organization called MV Speaker of the Year. They collaborate with hundreds of schools in Delhi and I visit them. So, if one is a part of any of those schools, they would have met me, seen me or worked with me. The other thing I do is the seed ball making workshop. Apart from that, I do a lot of butterfly walks where I take people around their colonies and parks, not the fancy parks, to show them how they can identify butterflies, how they can create an environment to have more of them. All those complaining that when they were kids they would have butterflies and now no longer they see them, I want to tell them that probably they have been more indoors absorbed in technology. So, I take them into their own garden and show them that butterflies are still around.

The future will belong to the nature-smart—those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.
Richard Louv, The Nature Principle

So, I do such initiatives for individuals, for schools, and whoever wants to collaborate is free to contact me. I don’t charge anything for any of these projects but I love and I enjoy doing more and more initiatives like these.

Unleash With FTEM: Watch the video

The above are excerpts from the conversation between Prachi Singh, lepidopterist and conservationist with Manasi Srivastava, in this episode of ‘Unleash With FTEM’.

Check out the playlist of Season1 of UnleashWithFTEM.

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Prachi Singh Lepidopterist Butterfly Girl - From The Experts Mouth — Prachi Singh

About Prachi Singh

Prachi Singh is a Chartered Accountant by profession and a Lepidopterist by passion.

She has been working towards creating and conserving butterfly habitats for almost two decades, and has been recognized in the Limca Book of Records for her efforts, consecutively in 2020 and 2021.