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Consider the beauty of nature — please!

By Gary Metro, Editor
The Southern Illinoisan

Butterflies are on my mind.

I started thinking about the insects last weekend. Instead of watching basketball on TV and napping in my recliner, I agreed to accompany my wife to something called The Butterfly House.

Normally I resist such suggestions as a sneaky effort to get me in touch with my feminine side. But Debbie was quite enthused about it and mentioned getting a good breakfast while we were on the road. That did it.

After about two hours of driving, a delicious omelet and several cups of coffee, we arrived at the aforementioned house of butterflies. It's a division of Missouri Botanical Garden and located in Chesterfield, a lovely area west of St. Louis and easily reached from Interstate 64.

The big attraction was "March Morpho Mania," an opportunity to walk among 3,000 tropical blue morpho butterflies. Indigenous to Central and South America, the blue morpho is both an impressive flyer and a thing of great natural beauty.

The butterflies were housed in an 8,000 square foot, indoor conservatory built of glass. Also inside the conservatory were an additional 1,000 other tropical butterflies from more than 50 species. The air was filled with butterflies in the dome-like structure. When they weren't dining on bananas and other foodstuffs, the butterflies were swooping around our heads, landing on us and pollinating plants.

It was one of the most astonishing sights of my life. The blue morphos are quite large for a butterfly, with a wing span of up to eight inches. And they are the most-appealing shade of blue you can imagine.

Words cannot do justice to the experience. I would recommend a visit to anyone; the peaceful sights and sounds would calm even the most restless child. Our fellow visitors walked slowly and carefully. It seemed everyone was smiling and, for once, I didn't see people jabbering on cell phones or texting non-stop, oblivious to the surrounding wonders.

There also was a video presentation in a small theater that made the larger point about our flying friends. We all recognize butterflies as a natural wonder - beautiful fairies of flight. We admire their grace, respect powers of flight that carry a Monarch butterfly up to 100 miles in a day and consider the approach and descent of a butterfly on our body as a sign of good luck.

Butterflies also are critical to the pollination of plants, including those growing things that become our food. There are concerns in the world of science about the decreasing numbers of butterflies (bees, too) and the impact it might have on the earth. Some of the concerns are linked to the use of pesticides and the conversion of wild lands to agricultural lands - all to generate more food for an ever-growing world population.