Visitors Fascinated By Insect Center
Outside the Butterfly Pavilion and Insect Center, it’s dry and sunny. Dust blows across a faded-brown midwinter landscape.
Inside the pavilion, it’s another world; the world of a tropical forest. A steamy breeze circulates clouds of mist. Water drips from pink hibiscus blossoms.
Giant sailor moths hang like a lounge-singer’s earrings from bottlebrush trees. And the air is filled with hundreds of butterflies.
Visitors enter with an unmistakable expression on their faces. Amazement.
“That’s what we do - amaze people,” says Deb Hruby, associate director of the insect zoo, which opened last year.
The nonprofit Butterfly Pavilion and Insect Center is funded by the Rocky Mountain Butterfly Consortium through philanthropy, private funding and support from the city of Westminster.
About 150,000 visitors have walked the Butterfly Pavilion’s stone paths and Insect Center’s habitats since it opened, including 12,000 schoolchildren, viewing the butterflies with awe and the exotic insects with a little trepidation.
The Insect Center is home to a menagerie of shiny rhino beetles as big as Snickers bars, furry tarantulas that could cover a person’s face with their long legs, and brittle-looking stick insects that cover much of a zoo volunteer’s forearm as he transports them around.
At the Insect Center, displays include descriptions of the insects’ native habitat and such other fun facts as how many legs a millipede has compared to the smaller, more dangerous centipede.
For visitors who want to touch as well as look, a volunteer mans a touch cart where Rosie, a Texas tarantula, a giant hissing cockroach, and a giant mealworm can be petted.
A set of air-lock doors separate the Butterfly Pavilion from the Insect Center, gift/snack shop and classroom areas of the facility. When visitors are ushered in, it’s to a chorus of “ahh.”
The pavilion is home to 1,200 butterflies at a time. They arrive from distant lands - Malaysia, the Philippines, El Salvador, Florida - in the crysalis stage and emerge as butterflies in about 10 days.
When they are fully formed, they’re released into a 7,200-square-foot, sun-filled greenhouse alive with the sounds of bubbling water.
They live and feed their entire lives - about 14 days - in the pavilion on the same exotic tropical plants they would seek out in their native habitat: goat bush, Egyptian star cluster, porter weed, butterfly bush, Mexican flame vine, hibiscus.
No Colorado butterflies are in the Pavilion except for the familiar orange-and-black monarch found in much of the world. Instead, there are huge sky-blue morphos, giant owl moths and dozens of tiny fluttering zebra longwings.
In the summer, flowers planted outside the facility will attract such native moths and butterflies as cabbage whites, clouded sulfurs and silvery blues.