Guided Meadow & Butterfly Walk with Lepidopterist Victor DeMasi

Have you spotted a butterfly in your backyard recently? Want to learn more about these and other pollinators during the peak butterfly season in Connecticut? Join us for a guided walk with expert lepidopterist, Victor DeMasi, on Saturday, August 20th at 10am. We’ll learn about the many different butterflies and pollinators that can be found in our region, and ways to promote the habitats that are critical to their survival.

The walk will be held at the Livingston-Higley Preserve, which is home to one of the Land Trust’s largest meadows. From monarchs to swallowtails, the meadow provides the perfect location for observing and learning about butterflies.

Registration: Advanced registration is required (click the button, below) and costs $5 per person.
Rain Date: Inclement weather will postpone the event to Sunday, August 22nd at 10am.
What to Bring: Participants are encouraged to wear long pants and to bring water and sunscreen. To protect our pollinators we ask that you apply any insect repellent before arriving.

About Our Butterfly Guide

Victor DeMasi is an extremely active member of The Pollinator Pathway. He was a wetland conservation officer in his hometown of Redding for 20 years and is presently a curatorial affiliate at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven. He busies himself with preserving open space in town and preserving butterflies in the museum. His field work with butterflies contributed almost a thousand citations to the recently published Connecticut Butterfly Atlas. He has contributed articles to scientific publications and his mark-recapture studies with Swallowtail butterflies was recently cited in the book Swallowtails of the Americas. During the pandemic he is doing a pollinator survey of two meadows in Redding, CT.

Recent butterfly study trips with his spouse Roanna, a photographer, include several visits to Amazon forest in Guyana, Nicaragua, and yearly studies in the Montane region of California assessing the impact of climate change on the fauna there. His work in South America was recently featured in The Yale Environmental News.

For the past 40 years Victor has been the owner of Monarch Painting, a decorative painting firm in Redding, Connecticut, which specializes, in faux finishes and tromple l’oeil.  His murals often feature natural history subjects such as native wild flowers and butterflies. Clients delight to a monarch butterfly painted sitting on top of a window frame in an unlikely corner of their house. Metamorphosis is the company’s slogan.