Butterfly Lady Visits Yet More Butterflies

An axiom of museum life commands that museum staff, while on vacation, will visit other museums. And thus, butterfly gardeners must also visit other butterfly gardens, botanical gardens, museum exhibits and possibly large clumps of roadside wildflowers in search of butterflies.

As Jill had things safely in hand at BioWorks, I was able to take a nice and fairly long (for me) vacation. However, of course, this vacation had to involve both museums and butterflies. Visiting with a friend in Springfield VA gave me an opportunity to drop into Washington DC for a day of museums and catching up with friends. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History is always my favorite for rooms of bones, shining gems and preserved giant squid, but in recent years they have added a butterfly exhibit that I just had to check out.

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A long and narrow outdoor butterfly garden perches between the mammoth museum building and a busy street that dips into an underpass. Two long, wide paths lead you through an outdoor garden designed for butterflies and pollinators in the most unlikely of spaces. The plantings were lovely and diverse and indeed the garden was working as there were butterflies to be found. Just moments from the congested traffic of the District, there was this tiny oasis of calm beside the National Mall.

Inside the museum's butterfly exhibit there was a timeline of butterfly evolution and development on the wall that included some lovely images of and actual fossils that detailed ancient insects.

My favorite part of this exhibit was a tiny piece of amber, lit from behind. Enclosed in the golden resin was Voltina dramba, a 20 million year old butterfly found in the Domincan Republic. This now extinct species of metalmark butterfly does have a close living relative that still flaps today: Voltinia danforthi of Mexico. This living species is a sister species to the 15-25 million year old fossil and each is the closest relative to the other. You can learn more about the Origin of the Butterfly in this post.

Although the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History is free, there was a charge for visiting their Live Butterfly Pavilion. The fiberglass shell of the enclosure is low with organic curves and reminded me of a chrysalis. Inside were dozens of butterflies imported from far-flung postmarks. Brilliant Blue Morphos, Malaysian Lace Wings and other

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exotic species were nectaring away in the hot, moist air.

If you happen to be in the District, take a few hours (or days) and stop in to check out this exhibit and the outdoor butterfly gardens. In the busy hustle of a large metropolis, the museum exhibits and gardens were surprisingly peaceful and incredibly well air conditioned on a hot July day.