An hour in a butterfly enclosure
I’ve always been drawn to is nature. I feel like every inch of it has such beauty and interest if you’re willing to get close enough. There is comfort in the pieces of nature we understand and curiosity and wonder in the pieces we have yet to learn about. I’m always excited to visit a new garden, and every time I travel to a new city, I make it a point to check out their botanical garden if they have one. Recently I got to visit the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami, Florida. It was my first time in a garden focused on tropical plants in a subtropical climate, so I was excited to see what they would highlight. I stumbled upon many favorite things throughout the day, but their Wings of the Tropics exhibit made me feel like a child again.
The exhibit is a greenhouse that has butterflies from Central and South America. I was fascinated with it and learned more about how the enclosure works from the volunteers. The chrysalides (the scientific plural form for chrysalis) are brought in from facilities in Central and South America. From there they are hung and labeled while the caterpillars turn into butterflies. You can watch the butterflies emerge from their chrysalis, where they’re given some time to rest. At first, their wings are furled up and very soft, so they remain on the chrysalis, hanging upside down to let their wings straighten out. Hanging allows fluid, called hemolymph, into their wings and helps them harden.
This process takes a few hours, but once their wings are hard they start slowly opening and closing them, as if stretching and trying them out. At this point volunteers gather the butterflies in a little net enclosure and get them ready for release into the larger exhibit. Since they’re still getting ready to fly, volunteers carefully pick them up out of the net enclosure and place them on your finger where they hang out until they feel ready to flutter away.
It was a really magical thing to watch. I saw children in awe walking with slow, quite deliberation as a butterfly lightly balanced on the tip of their finger. I watched adults turn into children with the joy of seeing these brightly colored butterflies, with flashes of electric blue or neon orange, fly around our heads. I noticed the sense of calm and joy in myself as we all walked through this space together, each of us children in our own way, surrounded by these delicate, flitting jewels gliding through the air, around us and with us.