{"id":1793,"date":"2012-03-25T23:02:58","date_gmt":"2012-03-26T03:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.seakingdom.net\/blog\/?p=1793"},"modified":"2012-03-26T19:12:57","modified_gmt":"2012-03-26T23:12:57","slug":"wings-over-deerfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.seakingdom.net\/blog\/2012\/03\/25\/wings-over-deerfield\/","title":{"rendered":"Wings over Deerfield"},"content":{"rendered":"

In February, we celebrated our anniversary by going to visit Magic Wings<\/a>, a butterfly conservatory in the town of Deerfield, Mass.\u00a0 I had passed by the place before, but never been there.\u00a0 After living in this area for more than 6 years, it was about time to check it out.<\/p>\n

Once you pay admission and are let in, you start out in a room full of terraria.\u00a0 There are various bugs, reptiles, and amphibians kept in here.\u00a0 Here is a yellow frog (I didn’t note what type it is or what its native region is):<\/p>\n

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And here are 2 specimens of one of a few varieties of walking stick type bugs they had:<\/p>\n

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Hint: the bugs look like yellow leaves amid the green leaves.<\/p>\n

Once we finished with that room, we headed through a positive-pressure chamber and then into the conservatory proper:<\/p>\n

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What you see in that picture is only about 10-20% of the space.\u00a0 There are lots of species of butterfly and moth in the place, just flying around free.\u00a0 Fortunately, they land a lot, which makes it easier to get pictures:<\/p>\n

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This is called a glasswing, for the obvious reason:<\/p>\n

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The big, red object that it’s perched on is a feeder, filled with nectar of some kind.\u00a0 There are a lot of these around, as well as actual flowers for the insects to feed on.<\/p>\n

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In the middle of our visit, one landed on my leg:<\/p>\n

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It slowly walked upward, and I had to just let it do its thing, as they have a strict rule against touching the animals (because of potential contamination).\u00a0 Once it got near my hip it decided to take off again.\u00a0 You might think that the butterflies would often land on people in this space, but it’s apparently a rare occurrence.<\/p>\n

Here are 3 ricepaper butterflies at a feeder:<\/p>\n

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This is some type of moth:<\/p>\n

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An owl butterfly:<\/p>\n

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IIRC, below is a blue morpho.\u00a0 The inside of its wings are the really vibrant, blue side, but it only showed that side when in flight (and it was hard to get a good picture of them in motion):<\/p>\n

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Here’s a video of one feeding, and not sitting still:
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