Butterflies!

Gainesville has some neat natural attractions, and I'm really looking forward to spending more time exploring them - especially as the weather cools. For someone not used to humidity, the 80-90 degree weather with humidity takes some adjusting to, but in reality, its not that bad. The cats are also working to adjust - our thermostat is set at 77, which is a lot hotter than our house in OR used to stay (naturally it was below 70 most of the time). They are all shedding like crazy, and spend a lot of the day stretched out under the ceiling fans:

At least the cats are settling in - they spent the first few days here hiding.

Last week, JD and I went to the UF Museum of Natural History, mainly to see the Butterfly Rainforest. While small, the exhibit was a lot of fun! The butterflies apparently are mostly from Costa Rica, and due to fears of spreading invasive species, there are no host species for the butterflies to lay their eggs. This means that there aren't any caterpillars - these apparently are shipped in, and there are daily releases of new butterflies into the exhibit.

Getting ready for the 2pm butterfly release. We were also given information about a lot of the butterflies.

The butterflies from the release apparently found this gentleman quite irresistible!

 One of my favorite butterflies of the exhibit was the Blue Morpho. We saw lots of these in Costa Rica. I didn't get a picture of them flying around, but the inside of their wings is a gorgeous bright blue. The outside is a brown with really cool eye spots. There were lots of these busy eating bananas:

Apparently, the plants and butterflies in the exhibit change frequently, so this will be a fun place to visit with friends and relatives when they come to town!

This atlas moth (below) was just hanging out in a tree. We were all so used to looking down for butterflies and moths that several groups of people just walked right past it! They released several new atlas moths during the butterfly release.

I don't remember much about the rest of the butterflies that we saw. There were also some seed-eating finches in the exhibit, along with fish and turtles in the water features and lots of lush, tropical vegetation. 

Apparently the light-colored butterfly in the above picture was used in one of the Harry Potter movies because it is highly attracted to sweet scents (making it easy to manage). People who wore scented lotion to the exhibit almost invariable ended up with one or more on them!

We also spent a little time in the Museum itself learning a bit about the natural history of the area before heading home.