Australian Butterfly Sanctuary in Kuranda (Cairns)

While we were in Cairns we drove up to Kuranda.  Actually I should say we drove back up to Kuranda, since we’d driven by on our way into town.  It’s up in the mountains and it’s a gorgeous little tourist town.  The big attraction is taking a skyrail or train up to the town, but unfortunately that was too pricey for us.  (We decided to spend our money on visiting the Great Barrier Reef instead!)  Because of the skyrail, Kuranda is quite the destination and all sorts of people visit the little town everyday.  There are a number of different attractions.  We were able to visit a few and our favourite was the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary. So many beautiful butterflies! Of course, everyone’s hope when visiting is to have a butterfly land on them. LadyBug latched onto a couple of girls and they taught her how to get the butterflies to crawl onto her fingers.  She wore bright pink on purpose with the hopes of attracting more butterflies. TurboBug kept jumping at the butterflies, trying to touch them.  They weren’t too impressed with him.  With a little help he did get to hold some. There are several different types of butterflies at the sanctuary, but I don’t remember seeing all of these when we were there. It’s strange to think most of the butterflies we saw there wouldn’t be there anymore.  Such beautiful creatures with such short lives. We had a walk over to the breeding nursery.  There was a microscope set up to have a closer look at the butterflies. We could see some of the caterpillars and they were amazing.  We watched them preparing food for the caterpillars, carefully washing all the leaves. They had heaps and heaps of butterflies in various stages of emergence. We happened to be in the right place at the right time, so we even got to see them release some butterflies! There was also this interesting display on how butterflies see differently from us.  They can see ultraviolet patches on flowers and on each other. But really, this was the best part. TurboBug looks so satisfied, doesn’t he?  It takes a lot of holding still which is difficult when you are two! Look!  There’s one of those beautiful Ulysses butterflies in flight.  We’d actually seen some of these on a nature walk and didn’t know what they were called.  They are such a striking blue and quite large. These are Common Eggfly butterflies.  They absolutely loved JitterBug’s yellow hat. The difference between butterflies and moths. On the way out there is a room with all sorts of butterfly and moth specimens on display.  According to a sign in this room there are 385 different species of butterflies in Australia.  It also said that in Greek, the word for ‘butterfly’ is the same as the word used for ‘soul’.  How lovely is that? My four little butterflies.  What fun!