My friend and I visited The Butterfly Place on Monday and left with a boatload of photos after wandering around in a leisurely fashion for 90 minutes. They have butterflies from every continent except the obvious one – a mite too chilly there. The best of my photos are below, presented in the order I took them. I’ve identified a few of the butterflies in the captions, and you can find many of the other names on their web site here.

All of these photos are 1920 x 1440, about half their original resolution. The only editing other than resizing that I did was some cropping on a handful and Photoshop’s auto-tone on most. Auto-tone automatically adjusts exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks, and it’s usually the first thing I do to photos imported from my camera. It’s almost never a bad idea.

Click on any thumbnail below to enter the gallery, where you’ll see medium-sized images. To see or save any particular image in full size, click on this at the lower right – you may need to scroll down to see it:

A brief panoramic video of the flight area is at the end of this post.

Overview of the flight area

The manic Graphium agamemnon eluded me entirely; the only time one sat still – for all of two seconds – auto-focus failed

White button quails were toodling all over

First blue morpho to land on my friend

They have beautiful sky blue uppersides, but they fold their wings as soon as they land

Blue morphos feasting on bananas; you can see some of that blue on the one at left

A second blue morpho stayed on my friend for about ten minutes

Female zebra finch

We thought the most interesting butterfly was the glasswing Greta oto

The chrysalis hatching booth

Emerged in the previous hour or so