Last full weekend in Monteverde

Today, Saturday, I woke up at a decent hour and went to the butterfly garden first thing in the morning. Since we are at the very beginning of the rainy season, the mornings are usually beautiful, it rains in the afternoon for a few hours and then again at night. If you are really unlucky it will rain from 11:30 all through the night (aka Wednesday). I wanted to try to get to the butterflies first thing in case it rained. Plus they are more active in the morning. The butterfly garden is actually four separate gardens with plants, environmental conditions and species from four different areas of Costa Rica. Having never been to a butterfly garden, I didn't know what to expect and when I walked into the first garden I was shocked. Flying around me were at least 100 butterflies, most prominent of them were the blue morphos. I just stood there (pretty sure my mouth was open too) for about 5 minutes. Within one minute though one of the butterflies lands on my shoulders! It was beautiful. The first garden was a lowland habitat, but strangely enough I saw some familiar species, including the blue morpho. Usually when morphos land, they close their wings because of the bright blue color that would attract predators. One of the reasons for the blue morphos brilliant color is that they only spend a couple weeks in the butterfuly stage and they need to mate before they die. The blue color is much more likely to attract a mate and when you are short on time you do what you can to make yourself wanted.

Me with an Owl butterfly on my backpackGiant swallow tail butterfly

Cantonephalie (probably spelled wrong) butterflyJulia butterflyPostman butterfly
Lucrea butterfly

The second garden was a mid-elevation habitat. Saw some really pretty ones! There were a couple that I couldn't catch with my camera, and then there was one species that they only had one butterfly of, it was hard to find.

Mexican silver spot
(undersides have silver scales on them and they shimmer when they fly)
Halloween butterfly

The third garden was a forest understory habitat garden. It was darker and a little more humid. Most of the species there are in the glass/clear/stained glass wing family.
It is very difficult to distinguish between the different species without looking at them under the microscope. I got a couple really good pictures though!


The last and largest garden was the cloud forest habitat. More blue morphos, more postman butterflies, and a couple I saw only a couple times and couldn't get photos of. It was wonderful. A blue morpho even landed on me! It was a wonderful place to spend two hours.

Cappuchino butterfly

The Blue Morpho!
Blue Morpho caterpillar
Monarch butterfly
The species that lives in the states migrates from Canada to Mexico to keep up with the warm weather and the food. This species doesn't migrate, it stays in Costa Rica the whole time.
Monarch caterpillar

After that, I walked down the hill and hit up the Serpentarium. Not too spectacular but fun to see the species. The one snake I really wanted to see, the eye-lash pit viper, was a bit of a let down. In all the pictures I have seen it has been bright yellow but the three I saw were green or greenand brown. I will have to do some research to see why the colors are different...could be something about where it is living, the food it is eating, the time of year or whether or not it is trying to mate. I'll look it up and let you know if you'd like.

After that, to complete the cycle, I went to the orchid garden. It was bigger than I thought and there were hundreds of orchids. Not all of them were in bloom, but with such a wide variety, you always see a good number of them with flowers. I don't have time to put up the pictures right now, plus my computer can't really hold any more photos right now, but I probably saw over 50 different species, and I'd only seen 4 before I went in there. Most of the species they have there are miniatures. and when they say miniature they mean really small! They have the smallest species of orchid in Costa Rica (maybe in the world) and the flower is less than one millimeter wide! They were fantastic! They even had five or six hybrids that they had created. It was facinating! Most of the orchids they had were epiphytes (live on something else but don't harm it) and I found out that over 80% of all orchids are epiphytic. So cool!

This isn't the smallest orchid. The "tree" it is on is only about 3/4 of an inch in diameter. The flowers are probably 5 mm across. The smallest is probably 2 mm across.

Octopus orchid!
Dracula orchid

Needless to say, it was a great Saturday.

Hugs!
K