pit stop with the butterflies~

As promised ... I thought I'd share some of our vacation with my fellow bloggers :)

One of the places we made a pit stop at was the Fort Worth Botanic Garden.  We have been there before when the garden were in full bloom, the Rose Garden, Fullers Garden, the Japanese Garden, and they are beautiful; but this time of the year nothing was in full bloom yet.  We knew this; but that wasn't the reason for our pit stop this year.  This year we wanted to see something new that we had seen advertised.

We went to the Conservatory to see the "Butterflies in the Garden", sponsored by the Fort Worth Garden Club, Fort Worth Botanical Society and the Botanical Research Institute of Texas.  They are as beautiful as the flowers and it was a wonderful way to spend a day.

It was very hot and humid in there ~ it took your breath away; but so worth it!  Not only were we in awe of the foliage and exotic plants ~ what really caught your breath were the butterflies.  All 12,000 of them ... released from Asia, Africa, South, Central and North America.

Now... you would think with that many butterflies fluttering around it would be an easy task to photograph them.  Wrong... in fact, it was really really hard to get a snapshot of them fluttering about.  They were sooooooooo fast ....... and your camera would fog up something fierce.  They had hair dryers along the walk way to defog your lenses.  Pretty cool idea, huh?

You would also think that they would be super easy to spot ... wrong again ... it was amazing how they blended in with the flowers and leaves.  But what was really amazing was the size of some of them.  The blue morphos are as big as your hand ... and even they were hard to get a snapshot of.  BUT... we persevered and did get some great photos.  Some of them though I must admit; I borrowed from the internet.

Here are some of the butterflies we saw: (in no particular order) malay lacewing, red cracker, malachite, great egg fly, orange longwing, small postman, zebra longwing, blue morpho, great mormon, paper kite, ruby spotted swallowtail, plain tiger and tailed jay.

--click on the image to enlarge and open in new window--

I hope you enjoyed the photo tour.
Until next time...
So it goes in my neck of the woods.
~mel