Frederik Meijer Garden Butterfly Exhibit

Monarchs are hard to spot in the caterpillar room

This year I finally went to the butterfly exhibit. Every year Fredrick Meijer Gardens Sculpture Park hosts butterflies. These beautiful insects are flown in as caterpillars and people can tour the gardens looking at the various stages of the butterfly. Then in the tropical room butterflies fly everywhere. It is very chaotic. They frolic and play and there were several that were as big as the palm of my hand. It is overwhelming, but amazing. I loved the fact I could watch these huge, beautiful creatures in the prime of their life fluttering about with out a care in the world. Really and truly it must be kind of stressful being a butterfly. Think about it: limited life span (2-3 weeks), having to find good places to lay eggs, need to find a good mate to fertilize eggs, constant worry about getting eaten or killed. Actually, I guess it's like being a human on a smaller scale (Without the worry of getting eaten or being crushed by toddler fingers).
 

When entering the gardens there are security in and out of the butterfly exhibit because apparently butterflies try and hitch rides with unsuspecting people. The brochure upon entry described in great detail where the butterflies are farmed from, Costa Rica, they are actually shipped up in the chrysalis stage.  The chrysalis are carefully packaged with cotton and soft paper and off they go to the gardens.  When they arrive at the gardens they are still in this stage.

I took some slow motion videos of the butterflies. They did not turn out as spectacular as I hoped. They were still moving pretty fast. Even the slow motion didn't make them look slow.

The pictures I took were not all that great either, but it was nice to just sit and enjoy the butterflies. My only regret is that I wish I had gone sooner in the season because they were starting to die out when I finally made it down. There are lots of good places to sit and a beautiful waterfall inside. The exhibit runs every year until around April 30th.

Here is some more pictures! 

This is a small postman, native to Central America