Butterflies of the Bay Area and (Slightly) Beyond

This program is included in the cost of standard Garden admission, which can be purchased online in advance or day-of at the gate.

Saturday, September 27, 2025
2-3:30pm
San Francisco Botanical Garden — Garden of Fragrance

About the Program

Author and illustrator Liam O’Brien discusses his new book, Butterflies of the Bay Area and (Slightly) Beyond, in conversation with Durrell Kapan, Senior Research Fellow at the California Academy of Sciences. Co-hosted by the Helen Crocker Russell Library and Green Apple Books on the Park.

Published by Heyday, Butterflies of the Bay Area and (Slightly) Beyond is both a guidebook and an illustrated obsession. Liam O’Brien has spent three decades chasing, learning about, protecting, occasionally catching, and loving butterflies. Here, he shares his vast knowledge of California butterflies through a treasure trove of stories and gorgeous, hand-drawn illustrations of the 135 species that live in the greater Bay Area.

This beautiful book also shares practical tips for finding and identifying all the butterflies who call the Bay Area home. Learn which plants nurture Silver-spotted Skippers, which trail to hike to see Swallowtails flitting creek-side, and why so many butterflies cluster on hilltops. Share in the joy that O’Brien brings to the study of butterflies!

About the Speakers

Liam O’Brien is a self-taught lepidopterist and illustrator. He used to be a professional actor, having appeared in Les Misérables on Broadway, but shifted his powers of observation towards nature several decades back. He’s fascinated not only by butterflies but also by our relationships to them. He surveyed the county of San Francisco, where he lives, for which butterfly species remained in 2007 and 2009. He is the creator of the Green Hairstreak Project for the organization Nature in the City, and he led efforts to restore Variable Checkerspots to the Presidio. Since 2015 he has helped monitor the endangered Mission Blue butterfly in the Marin Headlands. O’Brien was the recipient of Bay Nature magazine’s Local Hero Award for Environmental Education in 2014. He lives in San Francisco.

Durrell D. Kapan, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow at the California Academy of Sciences. He cut his scientific teeth studying warningly colored butterflies in Ecuador. At the Academy, he leads the Xerces Blue project—sequencing the extinct butterfly’s genome, modeling its habitat, and translocating Silvery Blue butterflies to the Presidio of San Francisco to help re-create Xerces’ ecological role in the city’s dunes. A long-time naturalist who studies flighted things (butterflies, birds, even mosquitoes), Durrell now works across genomics, data science, and field surveys from Bay Area dunes to Sierra forests.

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Heavy rain cancels. Admission to the Garden is free for San Francisco residents, veterans, Museums for All/EBT participants, and Gardens members.