"Elusive Butterfly" is a popular song written by Bob Lind, released as a single in December 1965, which reached #5 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the adult contemporary chart in the spring of 1966. In Australia, Lind's "Elusive Butterfly" entered the charts on April 10, 1966 and spent three weeks at #2 during July 1966.

In the song the narrator sees himself as a butterfly hunter. He is looking for romance, but he finds it as elusive as a butterfly.

Bob Lind wrote "Elusive Butterfly" around sunrise while pulling an all-nighter in 1964: at that time he was living in Denver, performing at local Folk clubs. Lind credits the song's inspiration as the W. B. Yeats' poem The Song of the Wandering Aengus, stating: "I wanted to write something that [like Yeats' poem] had the sense we feel of being most alive when we're searching or looking or chasing after something. That expectation is more life affirming than getting the thing you're after." The song was originally five verses long and with the instrumental passages Lind included its performance time approximated ten minutes: (Lind quote:) "I played it for everybody I knew but I didn't [think] 'Man, this is my best song: it's going to be a hit [that] millions of people [will] hear...It was just another [Bob Lind] song. I was thrilled [then] by everything I wrote."

In 1965, feeling that Denver's Folk music scene was in decline, Lind relocated to California, first staying in San Francisco: the day after he'd bused down to Los Angeles, Lind played a performance tape made at a Denver club for Richard Bock head of World Pacific Records. Although Bock had founded World Pacific - originally known as Pacific Jazz - to promote West Coast jazz the label had in July 1965 been acquired by Liberty Records and thus Bock was eager to sign Pop and Rock acts to his label, and Lind was indeed signed to World Pacific the day after he played his tape for Bock. (It would eventuate that Lind would be the only World Pacific artist to ever chart on the Pop oriented Hot 100 chart in Billboard magazine.)

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