Victoria Butterfly Garden
Do not be fooled by one star reviews of the gardens. We had a spectacular time here. The insect world has so much variety, it is hard not to be impressed. I particularly enjoyed the tortoise who knows how to escape his pen. His keepers have no idea how he gets out, but there he was walking the walk. “If they all learn how to escape, we’ll have to fix that. As it is if he’s happy getting loose, we’ll let him. We just cannot have all the tortoises loose.” There are only six of them.
The butterfly garden is close to Buchart Gardens. I plugged the address into our trusty GPS. Please enter a valid address! It could not find 1461 Benvenuto Ave! Smart Phones to the rescue. I got turned around and U-turned a few times getting there. We arrived at 3:35. The gardens closes at 4. We thought we’d have to come back the next day. “No, we stop letting people in at 4 but we stay open until 5.” Cool.
To the right of reception is the insectarium, a series of glass enclosures with very interesting “bugs” inside. The first larger one houses leaf cutter ants. “We feed them leaves two or three times a day. We have to change the leaf type every few days or they’ll stop feeding. In the wild they change the leaves they eat every few days. That way they don’t decimate one plant variety. The plants can recover in between.” The other enclosures hold stick bugs and beetles.
The butterfly garden is through a double door past the insectarium. Each variety of butterfly has favorite plants that the garden has in abundance. Inside are numerous butterflies, tortoises, parrots, a few lizards (hard to find), and a pair of mechanical flamingos. I photographed and videoed the flamingos before realizing that aside from a side to side motion with their beaks in the water, they did not move. I deleted my photos and videos. Who wants to see a mechanical bird anyway.
On the way out I mentioned the mechanical flamingos. “Oh you mean Mango and Houdini. They were born in 1976. Flamingos live for 50 or 60 years. These two are old guys.” I had gone back a few times to see if they were live birds. One of those times Houdini ruffled his tail feathers. Then I knew they were real, and took a video and some photos. They moved so little and in such a regular pattern that they look mechanical!
