Butterflies and Moths of North America

collecting and sharing data about Lepidoptera

BAMONA's blog

New gear and a partner in honor of Earth Day on April 22, 2025

New for Earth Day this year, we have released a special shirt design to highlight the importance of growing native plants to help protect insects. Check out our BAMONA Shop to find these beautiful shirts. For every Earth Day Special Release shirt purchased between April 18 and April 25, 2025, Bonfire will donate $1 to Pollinator Partnership.

Pollinator Week is June 17-23, 2024

Pollinator Week is a celebration of pollinators. The 2024 theme is "Vision 2040: Thriving ecosystems, economies, and agriculture." You can participate by joining a Pollinator Week activity, by contacting your local government to request participation in building lightings, or sign and mail proclamations to send to your governor. Learn more at the Pollinator Week website.

Loss of an exceptional lepidopterist and naturalist, Ranger Steve Mueller

We are sad to report that Ranger Steve Mueller passed away on June 16, 2022.
Ranger Steve was an kind-hearted human being, and his life and contributions are well described by Judy Reed in this story. Ranger Steve was a collaborator of the BAMONA project and served as a reviewer from the outset of the project. He verified more than 8,000 records for us, but his knowledge and contributions can't be quantified by this number.We will be missed by many.

Near-record number of verified submissions in 2021

Thank you submitters and coordinators! BAMONA added 37,841 verified records to the database in 2021, just 136 records shy of the record high in 2020. As of this writing, 13,001 submissions have been verified so far in 2022. Let's keep it up and see if we can make it to 40,000 this year!

In May, BAMONA reached the milestone of over 900,000 verified records in the database. This is a testament to the hard work and dedication of volunteer coordinators and citizen scientists. Thank you!

Here's a complete breakdown of NEW VERIFIED SIGHTINGS ADDED each year for recent years:

Longtime lepidopterist Ray E. Stanford passed away May 28, 2022

Ray E. Stanford had a passion for butterflies and made significant contributions to the field through his publications and collaborations. Stanford was a central figure in the development of paper atlases in collaboration with Paul Opler and Harry Pavulaan in the 1990s. These popular paper atlases documented the presence of butterflies in U.S. counties, and eventually led to early web sites hosted by the USGS Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center (NPWRC). The data complied by the NPWRC are stored in the BAMONA database and appear on the species maps as historical records.