Butterfly Jungle

I hadn’t expected to see the butterfly jungle while we were at the Wild Animal Park. The website said that it would only be there until April 18th, and we had gone on April 22. It would probably explain why I didn’t see nearly as many butterflies as the plaques said there were. I wanted to see the blue one, but there was no blue one’s in site. There were still plenty of butterflies left though, along with several birds.

Unfortunately, some of my photos were rather blurry. The butterflies didn’t stay long and I used the long lens which doesn’t have a wide aperture (meaning the iris doesn’t open big enough to allow enough light in. Narrow aperture + long lens + low light = blurry pictures. To combat this, you’re supposed to use a longer exposure, meaning that you imprint the image onto the disk longer. But again, long lens+low light+long exposure = blurry photo because I can’t keep the camera stable enough and I don’t carry a tripod. It’s hella heavy.).

But you can see that some of the butterflies were on their way out. The edges of the butterfly wings are all raggedy. The reason why this butterfly has that big old eye on its wing is that it looks like an owl’s eye. when predators are around, they flutter their wings so it looks like owl’s eyes blinking and the predators think better than to try and eat it.

And here is a photo of one of the birds that were in the same enclosure. I don’t know what it’s called or why it’s so colorful, but I really like mohawk.

Crossposted to Samantha Ling, Dreamwidth and Livejournal