I took myself up to London this morning, having realised after my mother's cleaning frenzy yesterday and her fussing today that nothing was going to come of those plans which had kept me alive through the latter half of the week. It also gave me the chance to avoid the excruciating planned dinner with my sister's internet boyfriend of one month; I don't give it much of a chance as her taste has previously run to unemployed and unambitious potheads with amateur interest in playing music. We shall see. The plan was to go to London Zoo if the weather remained dry - which seemed unlikely from the darkening grey underbelly of the clouds I glimpsed through the grimy Southeastern train window - or to go to the Natural History Museum if it rained. I took the Tube to Piccadilly Circus from Charing Cross and made a detour to visit the flagship Waterstone's store there.
When I stepped out again, after perusing their newly revamped stationery section which seems to have seen a parting of the ways with Paperchase, it was raining, so I walked back to Piccadilly Circus and caught the train to South Kensington. I walked along the tunnel and climbed up to the garden outside of the Natural History Museum, where the Sensational Butterflies exhibit is being held. It's a large heated marquee with those plastic flap doors to prevent the butterflies from escaping, with netting inside between the tent and the plants that have filled the space for the insects to rest on. They have a choice for how much you can pay: an unadorned £4.50, without extra donation to the museum, or you can bump it up to £5.50 and Gift Aid if you pay tax in the UK, so that is what I did. There's a five minute wait to go in so it doesn't get too crowded, but it must have been (relatively) quiet as I got in right away.
The first thing that struck me was the humidity. My glasses steamed up immediately; I had to wipe them down. There's no flash photography, but you can take regular pictures, and there were a lot of people with smartphones taking snaps. The second thing was that there are a lot of butterflies, weaving around the people, the plants, the ceiling like drunken jet fighters. They move very quickly without obvious purpose, except for when I was completing a survey near the end and a large butterfly decided to fly in circles around the survey guy Max, round and round his legs. There's a great variety of butterflies present as well. I have a preference for the big blue morpho (Morpho peleides) which is South American and one of the largest of its kind in the world. They were very obliging subjects for photography.
There was a butterfly feasting table set up with slowly decaying oranges and bananas on which a little coterie of owl butterflies were glutting themselves. They feed from rotting fruit and even animal dung, which is not an image that most people associated with butterflies.
Some of the butterflies were more cooperative than others. It was easier to snap them when they had settled on a leaf or one of the signs posted throughout the exhibit, because they would stay unmoving for a couple of minutes, than when they were drinking nectar from the flowers, as they would flap rapidly while eating before moving quickly on, like bumblebees.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but they don't completely capture the atmosphere of an exhibit like this: muggy, sticky with moisture, a multitude of colourful aviators as fragile as sugar paper and as carefree as amateur pilots forcing you to duck out of the way as they wobble straight towards your head. The little girl who started crying as a butterfly had landed on her knee and then on her toy in the pram, while her family giggled at the absurdity; the woman commenting to her young daughter that her perfume must be very floral while her husband snapped a picture of a butterfly that had landed on her side, just under her armpit.
The colours are wonderful. I love this dusky green one, as if it has been dusted with a little sprinkling of yellow across its back. It may be a green banded swallowtail missing its tell-tale bottom wing protrusions. There were quite a few battered butterflies with torn wings.
I spent ages trying to get a decent shot of this white and orange fiend. This is the Orange Tip and it's actually native to the UK.
I really recommend the exhibit, although perhaps not to families with quite small children - it's a coin flip whether a toddler stares silently in wonder, bursts into tears at being used as a landing strip for a butterfly, or tries to stamp on them or grab them.
