Butterflies in Nature Coloring Pages
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Where the Butterflies set focuses on the insect, this one puts it back in its habitat: the garden it feeds in, the forest it migrates through, the dandelion it lands on. These 28 butterfly nature coloring pages are scenes rather than portraits, which means there is always a background to solve as well as a pair of wings. Every design downloads as a free printable PDF sized for US Letter paper.
Three sheets keep the scene uncluttered and are the ones to start with: Swallowtail Butterfly in a Lush Garden Scene, Two Butterflies Dancing Over a Wildflower Meadow and Butterfly and Bee Together on a Flower Meadow, which adds a second pollinator without crowding the page.
Four more fill the frame corner to corner and take real time. Butterfly Migration Through a Forest, Butterflies and Hummingbirds in a Flower Garden and Swarm of Butterflies Over a Flower Field each give you dozens of separate wings to keep track of. Butterfly Garden is the densest sheet in the set and the only one that arrives with solid black wing panels already drawn in, so the monarch reads as a monarch before you have colored anything.
The one to use with children is Butterfly Lifecycle Scene, which puts all four stages on a single sheet in order. If you are also planting for butterflies, the practical point is that nectar plants feed adults but host plants feed caterpillars, and monarchs will only lay on milkweed, so a garden full of flowers and no milkweed gets visitors but no next generation.
The rest of the set moves the insect through the year and around the world. Butterfly on a Cherry Blossom Branch is the spring page, and Tropical Butterfly in a Rainforest Canopy is the one that justifies the brightest palette here. Butterfly Garden With Multiple Species on Flowers rewards giving each species its own pattern rather than coloring them all alike. Butterfly on Flowers sets five butterflies over zinnias and tulips against a lot of open white, which makes it the quickest sheet here to finish. Butterfly Landing on a Dandelion Puff is an exercise in restraint: leave the seed head as bare paper and let a few broken lines carry it.
More in this direction: Butterflies, Flowers, Gardens and Butterfly Mandalas.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the four stages of a butterfly's life cycle?
Egg, larva (the caterpillar), pupa (the chrysalis) and adult. The word to be careful with is cocoon: moths spin cocoons out of silk, but a butterfly caterpillar forms a chrysalis from its own hardening skin. The lifecycle sheet in this set shows all four stages in sequence.
How far do monarch butterflies actually migrate?
Up to about 3,000 miles, from Canada and the northern United States to a small number of overwintering sites in the mountains of central Mexico. No single butterfly makes the full round trip, it takes several generations, and yet each autumn generation finds the same forests. It remains one of the genuinely unexplained feats in animal navigation. The migration scene draws the journey as a stream of butterflies through trees.
What should I plant to attract butterflies?
Two kinds of plant, not one. Nectar plants feed the adults: coneflower, milkweed, lantana, verbena, buddleia. Host plants feed the caterpillars and are species-specific, milkweed for monarchs, parsley, dill and fennel for swallowtails, violets for fritillaries. A garden with only nectar plants attracts butterflies but does not sustain them.
Which of these pages work for a school project?
The lifecycle sheet and the migration scene pair naturally with a science unit, and Butterfly and Bee Together on a Flower Meadow suits a lesson on pollination because it puts two different pollinators on the same flowers. All are free printable PDFs with no sign-up, so a class set costs nothing beyond paper.