In August 1999 my daughters and I visited a seasonal butterfly exhibit a few minutes from home, called Wings of Paradise. Recently someone posted a message on the newsgroup sci.bio.entomology.lepidoptera that it had just opened as a butterfly conservatory in January 2001. This sounded like slick marketing until I visited the website and discovered that Wings of Paradise is open 12 months of the year as of January 27.
Of course there is a huge difference between raising butterflies for a few months in the summer and keeping a tropical paradise open all year. The small greenhouse we visited 19 months ago could hardly compare with the Niagara Parks Butterfly Conservatory 90 minutes away, where we visited last year. My first trip there is recounted in The butterfly industry (March 8, 2000).
Competition in paradiseWith the older exhibit outside Niagara Falls, Ontario, I was surprised to learn a second one in Cambridge had gone ahead with building a substantial facility necessary to house tropical butterflies through winter. My daughters are visiting for their March Break this week, so we had to go visit and see how the new one measures up.
Wings of Paradise is situated on pleasant farmland in a convenient triangle between three cities in a 20-minute radius: Kitchener-Waterloo with a population of about 180,000, Guelph 96,000, and Cambridge 85,000. The site is also about 75 minutes west of Toronto and less than 10 minutes from Highway 401, the major freeway which gives Ontario its transportation backbone. John G. Powers, whose dream is embodied in this new greenhouse, couldn't have chosen a better location to set up competition. The Niagara Parks location is part of a botanical garden, which Wings of Paradise lacks. But it boasts spacious meadows and a woodland nature trail to attract butterflies and their admirers in summer.
Impressive displayIt also features two museum-style rooms containing thousands of preserved insect specimens, most of them presumably collected by Powers, a life-long lepidoptera enthusiast. As interesting and educational as this was, I must confess to feeling uneasy after touring the collection. There was a time when stuffed birds and mammals fascinated me, and satisfied my childhood desire to see wild things. But now they seem morbid to me. And those thousands of insects pinned in boxes, for all their beauty, were dead. I couldn't help remembering Renie Burghardt's comment on my butterfly article last year, that nature's creatures deserve freedom.
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