Callaway Gardens - Butterfly House

While in Georgia for the Christmas holiday, we had the fortune of visiting Callaway Gardens.  After seeing some of Callaway Gardens' amazing birds of prey, we had just enough time to see a few butterflies before getting supper and driving through their spectacular Fantasy in Lights show. 

The Cecil B. Day Butterfly Center is large, glass-enclosed, conservatory filled with tropical flowers and even a small waterfall.  Hundreds of tropical butterflies representing 50 species fly freely around the conservatory.

tropical flowers inside the Cecil B. Day Butterfly Center

I do not know a lot about tropical butterflies and am therefore am not good at identifying them.  Thus I was quite stunned when, at the sight of the very first butterfly we came upon, my four-year-old calmly stated, "Oh look!  There's a Blue Morpho butterfly."

Blue Morpho butterfly at a banana cage at Callaway Gardens

Well, at least she's learning something useful from those TV shows!
Go, Diego!  

Later on, we saw a Blue Morpho with the beautiful wings opened.

Blue Mopho butterfly at Callaway Gardens

There were also many butterflies from the Heliconiinae family, which are often called longwings.

Tiger Longwing butterfly at Callaway Gardens

Some of the most stunning butterflies from this category are the Cethosiea, or lacewing, butterflies.

Lacewing butterfly at Callaway Gardens

Once up close, one can easily see why they are called 'lacewings'.

Lacewing butterfly at Callaway Gardens

Several of the butterflies looked like it had been a long day and they were ready to leave...

Clipper butterfly at Callaway Gardens

While other, most likely younger butterflies nectared on the plentiful flowers, and many more flitted about the conservatory.

I think this is a Great Eggfly butterfly, nectaring on pentas.

Besides the butterflies, the tropical conservatory itself was a treat, full of beautiful and even unusual look flowers.

I think I need some pink crocosmia for my garden now...

Outside of the butterfly room are all the chrysalises of the different butterflies behind glass with what looked to be a tunnel for newly emerged butterflies to fly into the butterfly conservatory.  Pupa are shipped to the butterfly center from Malaysia, the Philippines, and Central and South America.

Butterfly chrysalises at Callaway Gardens

I had such a great time at Callaway Gardens seeing the Birds of Prey show and visiting the Butterfly Center; however, my kids' favorite part of the day was the holiday light show.  Five miles of music combined with millions of Christmas lights - well, I guess it's hard to compete with that!

linking with the Little Red House blog for Mosaic Monday