Heidi Anne's Butterfly Adventure

A few days ago Heidi Anne and I went on a Butterfly Adventure. One of the perks of living in an agricultural college town is there are some interesting free activities to do. Double bonus, since it's summer, the town is fairly vacant. We went to the Stoke's Nature Center, where they hosted the Butterfly Hunt. 

They had some cute crafts for the kids to do, like a caterpillar to butterfly flip book, tissue butterflies, and fuzzy caterpillars. This is Heidi Anne's tissue butterfly. It's meant to hang in the window so birds to fly into them. They taught about the different butterflies and moths in the valley. 

Then the ranger gave the kids some butterfly nets and let them lose. If any of the kids (or parents) caught a butterfly or moth we took them into the center and the ranger would identify it. 

While we didn't catch a butterfly, we got close! While we were there a total of 3 Monarchs, 2 swallowtails, a swootywing moth, and a few dragon flies (close enough, right) were captured. 

Each time a kid yelled "I GOT ONE!!" Heidi Anne was close behind them as they took the critter into the Nature Center. The ranger would identity it, the other kids would run out, but Heidi Anne always found something new each time we entered the station.  

One time, Heidi Anne found some binoculars. Which lead to her finding                                                                                                    some hummingbirds. 

 Shortly afterwards she returned outside. With her net in hand she was going after anything that moved. (Which included pollen).  

Another buggy was found and rushed inside. This time around Heidi Anne found a display of skulls and bones of local forest animals. She would guess what the animal was and then see the picture underneath. She was pretty accurate. She wanted to know where more bones where, I had to explain that we would have to go to a museum.    

Before we left she had to play with the binoculars one last time. Asked if they really didn't have more bones or fossils. The way home she kept asking when we could go to a museum, when can we get our own binoculars, when could we go camping, a picnic, ect. You can tell it was quite a fun little adventure since she was jumping at the bit to go on a new adventure.