Butterfly Haven

My niece and nephew are visiting this week and we took them to a butterfly facility. First time going to something like this, and unfortunately it is the end of the season so butterflies and plants were getting a little beat up but... I hope you enjoy this second hand experience.
Bumble bee hive in the entry
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Newly hatching specimens
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And now the main butterfly habitats
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They also these tiny birds I learned are called buttonquail. Very small, cute, and beautiful birds. There were even chicks!
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I like the fact of all butterflies being American natives, a thematized butterfly house is always better than a general mixture of common used ones. I like even more the use of local wild herbaceous plants such as Cephalaria and umbellifers that are liked by many insects but that are very rarely seen, allowed to grow or capable to grow at butterfly houses, where lustful underforest tropical plants are preferred and the other more light-demanding species don't grow well and are not seen as other than noxious weeds.

By the way, it's a very extended error to call buttonquails the Chinese blue quails than half of more of butterfly houses in the world use as live decoration. True buttonquails do not even belong to the same Order - buttonquails can look like quails but are much more closely related with cranes.

What a wonderful place to visit, surrounded by nature and beautiful butterflies!

I am for such a long time to visit a butterfly facility in the surroundings that with pandemy I forgot. Thanks for bringing these pictures to us, it is good to remember that there are many nice places to visit everywhere, we just need to not forget them.

Wonderful!! Butterflies are so interesting and beautiful as well! Sadly in our area they became very rare. Thank you for all these photos!

Yes I really liked that this place exhibited native species also. They breed some of them, like the monarchs, and release them to help boost populations which I was really impressed by. We got to see examples of 3 different species' life cycles (eggs, caterpillar, chrysalis/cocoon, and adult butterfly) and overall it was just a really neat locally developed facility. They also discussed why butterflies are so threatened and what can be done to help them out (including planting milkweed seeds from their giftshop for the monarchs). One of my sisters has been to another supposedly well established facility but it appears that the locally run one has better opportunity to see the animals themselves up close, some of them even landed on us (I suspect to check out our beads of sweat from the humid and hot environment). They had some awesome plants too, like a huge artichoke plant I forgot to get a photo of. In addition to butterfly bushes, zinnias, alyssum, milkweed, coneflowers, etc. And lastly, I was really excited to read about the quail that are not quail. They were very pretty little things and it was fun to see them run around in the underbrush as well as see the chicks that were about the size that they could sit on a US quarter.