WELCOME to my butterfly page! If you have stumbled upon it while looking for Peter Padfield's Naval history site (my father), please click HERE.

STOP PRESS: Volume 4 of Patrice Leraut's 5-volume MOTHS OF EUROPE is now out. Click HERE for details.

I created this page way back in 1996 as an online photo album for my butterfly pictures. Since then it has grown enormously and now covers most central European butterflies. It is still essentially a personal page, though. All the pictures are my own and the emphasis is on sharing pleasure in these beautiful creatures rather than creating an authoritative source of information about them. The butterflies are all photographed in the wild and I make a point of interfering with their lives and behaviour as little as possible. This means not chasing an individual butterfly indefinitely just to get that perfect picture, not trampling surrounding vegetation and not disturbing butterflies engaged in behaviour such as courting or mating. With the ready availability of cheap but high quality digital cameras, more and more people now spend time in the countryside photographing butterflies and other plants and animals. This is excellent, but we must all take great care not to let our hobby become intrusive and add to the myriads of other pressures that threaten our wild creatures from all sides.