This Flickr page is meant to gather pictures of butterflies (and moths/other wildlife) in the Western Palearctic and beyond.

The main aim of the blog is to share all kinds of information on butterflies, to give that bit of extra information that lacks in compact field guides to help to better see the differences between different taxa, to try to close the gap between taxonomists and naturalists,... The Flickr page is a means to help in this.

A description of the Western Palearctic area (WP) can be found on wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Palaearctic

Taxonomy is a scientific discipline with constantly changing knowledge and with a lot of different opinions. On this page I follow An updated checklist of the European Butterflies for Europe and for the areas not covered by that article I try to follow a similar position "in the middle", between lumping & splitting.

Ofcourse, as I am based in Belgium there will be a bias on the coverage but I hope to minimise this in the future and be able to show you butterflies from every corner of the WP.

Also check my blog: westpalbutterflies.blogspot.be/

All pictures (c) Pieter Vantieghem

Scrolling through the photos is probably easiest by using the collection view: www.flickr.com/photos/161811907@N06/collections