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                              Roger Grund

Roger Grund has been interested in butterflies for most of his life. His interest commenced early due to the presence in his household of the large green Birdwing butterfly and the large blue Ulysses butterfly brought back from New Guinea by an uncle present there during World War 11, and also due to the presence of a bright blue Amaryllis Azure butterfly collected by his mother when his parents were opal mining at Andamooka. This interest was fostered by his late mother Jean Grund OAM, a noted naturalist and photograper.

Being a petroleum geologist, Roger had the chance to study butterflies as a hobby in many places around the world while in pursuit of his work. Upon retirement in the early 1990s, his interest in South Australian butterflies was once again fostered. Undertaking many surveys of butterflies for the Department of Environment in South Australia, he soon recognized that the extensive urbanization and agriculturalisation of the environment that had occurred in the forty-year period of his absence from Adelaide had caused severe consequential loss of habitat and butterflies, many of which were irreplaceable forms now totally lost by extinction.

Roger was a founding member of the Butterfly Conservation South Australia group in 1998, its chairman from 2001 – 2007, and now is an Honorary Life Member. He has continued to write and publish many scientific papers, and has amassed a very extensive photo collection of butterflies and their biology, some of which are portrayed in "South Australian Butterflies" on his website. He was responsible for a major taxonomic revision of the Theclinesthes group of butterflies in collaboration with his Japanese friend Atuhiro Sibatani. On many of his later surveys he was accompanied by his friend and fellow lepidopterist, the late Lindsay Hunt. Together they added ten additional butterflies to South Australia’s butterfly fauna [from an original number of 64 at the time], and managed to elucidate and photograph all the butterflies occurring in South Australia along with their early-stage biology, examples of which are portrayed in the Society’s book "Attracting Butterflies to your Garden".

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