magic wings

We went to the COOLEST PLACE EVER yesterday -- Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory in South Deerfield, MA. I took a bunch of pictures, so my next 3 or 4 blogs will be about this place too.

This first photo is a sign inside the Conservatory that is made up of photos of letter patterns from the wings of actual butterflies at the Conservatory. We met the woman who took these pictures (and most of the picture on display) and chatted with her quite a bit. She's a professional photographer that happens to love butterflies and lives nearby, so she decided that working here was the perfect place for her.

Here's a sample of what it looks like inside the Conservatory. A lush growth of tropical plants covers the place, and there are over 4000 butterflies of several dozen species flying free inside the huge space. They also have some ADORABLE Button Quail running amongst the undergrowth (never did get a photo of them, the undergrowth was just too dark), a Koi pond, and a variety of other small birds (obviously all fruit eaters, not insect eaters!!)occupying the tree-tops.

It didn't take long for Zoo Boy to make a friend. Visitors are allowed to wander freely on the paths throughout the building, and there are many benches and other resting places to settle in and wait for a butterfly to come visit you. We all had multiple times where Butterflies landed on us. Zoo Boy's friend is a Malachite Butterfly.

Here's our group -- my grandmother, my mother, J and Zoo Boy, enjoying a rest on one of the many benches in the Conservatory. J has a butterfly identification chart that we purchased at the door (full of pictures taken by that woman I mentioned earlier). We also met a local boy who frequents the conservatory who was great about telling us which butterflies were shy, which were friendly, and what to do to get them to land on us.

My mom holds out her hand (which has a Banded Orange butterfly on it) to give J an opportunity to transfer it to his hand (didn't happen, it flew off). We all wore different color shirts as an experiment to see which color best attracted the butterflies, but then were told by one of the employees that it has more to do with body heat than the color of our shirts. However, we did notice that the blue butterflies tended to like me in my blue shirt, and the yellow butterflies tended to like Zoo Boy in his yellow shirt....as for J, they were landing on his head.