newest addition: Butterflies and Ranunculus

Wow, I didn't do a single entry in the whole month of May! I'll try to do a quick re-cap of the past moth or so via pictures.

We kept seeing billboards for the butterfly jungle exhibit at the zoo, so finally one day we decided to go check it out. Luckily we stopped by the exhibit early in our day, because unbeknownst to us, even though the butterfly exhibit was free, you needed tickets to see the butterflies at a certain time in the day, kind of like how the fast passes work at Disneyland. We ended up getting a time slot about an hour before the park closed (which was only a couple hours away from when we got the tickets), so I feel bad for people who came to the zoo from out of town and ended up not being able to see the exhibit because they didn't know about the "come back later" tickets like us.

We decided not to venture too far from the butterfly exhibit, less we end up too far to make it back in time to get in line. Right next to the butterflies was the lorikeet feeding area. When we bought food, the zoo guy warned us that they weren't eating very well right now. They were probably full from eating all day.

The scraggliest of all the lorikeets happened to perch on Aaron's arm

One landed on mom, and I had to take a picture before I shoo-ed the bird away.. she handled the situation surprisingly well. No screaming or crying :)

Bats were on exhibit, too. They house them in a sauna-like room where everyone huddles around and stares at them. I was getting claustrophobic in there because of the woody smell and the heat. They were pretty cool, though.. these big ones pictured above were my favorite.

Here's a picture of Kaila looking at some fake butterflies strategically placed in this glass box.. We didn't get much hands on butterfly action in the exhibit. They are flying around and landing on whatever they please, including visitors, we just weren't lucky enough to actually get landed on. We got to see lots of pretty ones, though. Mom bought us a picture they took of us (maybe I'll try to post it later) and whenever Kaila sees it, she says, "buh-fai jungo."