Owl butterfly

That is one creepy ass looking eyespot, isn’t it? That would keep me away if I were a bird.

Postman butterfly

A delicate butterfly that is native to Central and South America.

Julia butterfly

This one has a great Latin name Dryus Iulia. For some reason I just love that

But my piece de resistance, so to speak is this photo:

Everything just came together perfectly in this photo, and it’s amazing how the butterfly is barely hanging on to the flower. I heard one of the flight attendants telling a child not to pick a butterfly up off the ground because they have  barbs (similar to Velcro) on their feet. These barbs help them hold on to flowers, and if you just pick them up, you could pull these barbs off and essentially kill them because they couldn’t land on a flower after that. Good thing to know.

Other highlights of the day were :

1.  Watching two turtles start mating right as a couple with a small child walked up to them. Well, let’s put it this way, the male was mating. The female could have cared less about it.

2.  I was taking pictures when one of the blue morphos landed on the lens, literally inches from my face. I wish I’d been with someone else so they could have taken a picture of that, but maybe the best moments aren’t meant to be photographed.

3. There was a mother there  who admitted to me that she told her daughter that butterflies have fangs like vampires. You could tell the little girl was freaked out by all the swooping and the fluttering, so I just tried to explain to her that instead of fangs, a butterfly’s nose is like a straw that they use to suck sugar out of flowers. I don’t know if that helped the little girl but I’ve never wanted to slap a stranger in public before. Good thing I didn’t. How would I have explained to Bill that I got arrested at a butterfly greenhouse?