My choice on our road trip was to visit
Butterfly World which is located in Tradewinds Park, Coconut
Creek, it is the largest
butterfly park in the world and the first park of its kind in the
Western Hemisphere. The facility boasts around five thousand live butterflies
and the opportunity to be enclosed with hummingbirds. I needed no further
tempting so we left our Super 8 in Naples and drove toward Fort Lauderdale on
the Atlantic coast.
Big Bear
found his macro setting, put on his Mr. Bean face of deep
concentration and took some lovely shots which also kept his trigger
finger busy....
History: After
retiring from a career as electrical engineer, Robert Boender started raising
butterflies and their food plants in his home in Florida. In 1984 he established
MetaScience to help supply farmed butterflies to zoos and universities. After
having visited England in 1985, where he met Clive Farrell (founder and owner of
the London
Butterfly House), he
decided to create his own facility in Florida. Boender and Ferrell entered into
partnership and started planning the facility, which was to be a public
attraction, but also a research facility and a butterfly farm. Butterfly World opened on the 28th of March
1988. Since then it has expanded to include the largest free flight hummingbird
aviary in the United States and an aviculture research centre.
Exhibits: The Paradise Adventure Aviary includes fountains with ponds and
butterflies. Next is the Hanging Garden & Butterfly Emerging Area where
cases with hanging pupa and emerging butterflies are on display. The Tropical
Rain Forest Aviary includes a waterfall, tropical plants, free flying birds and
butterflies. Grace Gardens is an outdoor botanical garden with flowering tropical
plants. Also on the property is one of the largest collections of flowering Passion Flower
vines in the world (own blog), in the Wings of the World Secret Garden. The
Jewels of the Sky Aviary is where hummingbirds and
other birds can be seen.
The Lorikeet
Encounter was a desperate
place we found quite upsetting. All these scruffy but should be stunning birds
had was the concrete floor, metal hand rail or a chain to sit on. The
punctuation in their boredom was to visit bowls frequently topped up with nectar
and humans who paid a dollar to have a small pot full to feed them with. No
greenery, no branches, no toys, now it said on the information board that these
creatures are lively, fun and inquisitive but all they do is wrestle and look
for the odd mole. One was relieved to see I had a tissue worth investigating.
Result – a fairly moth eaten looking bunch.
The
macaws lot was little better than the lorikeets
The
Museum/Insectarium features exhibits of mounted specimens of
beetles, scorpions, butterflies, moths and other insects.
The
Bug Zoo displays live insects including cockroaches, spiders, wasps, walkingsticks and mantids.
Conservation: Passiflora Society
International was established at Butterfly World to
encourage research on and help share information about passion flowers, which
are the source of food for many butterflies. Visitors can view the laboratory where the butterflies are raised and
can see the different stages including eggs, caterpillar and pupa.
Butterfly World has also helped establish the Boender Endangered Species
Laboratory at the University of Florida, which is helping reintroduce the Schaus
swallowtail to Southern Florida.
ALL IN ALL A LOVELY PLACE TO VISIT
.
