Butterfly Encounter at Chattahoochee Nature Center is through July 31

Kids and nature go together like hand and glove. Our kids love going there for no reason at all. They’ve got a lake where dozens of turtles lounge on the fallen trees on a summer’s day and dozens of other critters in natural settings that the kids love learning about. Normally it’s status quo and a good place to pass time.  However, now Chattahoochee Nature Center has an exhibit, Butterfly Encounter that will absolutely leave you breathless.

I wasn’t expecting much. When they said Butterfly Encounter I figured that they meant the butterflies would be out in force at their numerous butterfly attracting plants. To an extent that was true, there were some butterflies near those plants.

Butterfly Encounter takes place inside a tented area immediately across from the beaver pond. The tents are secure and have dozens upon dozens of butterfly friendly plants with hundreds of butterflies inside.

You really can’t capture how full the area is with butterflies until you go in there.  From outside the tent you can see some, but once you enter you are in the tent you can finally see why this exhibit is so worth checking out. Butterflies will land on you; flutter around to any of the plants or on the sugar-water paint brushes that you can pick up when you enter.

It’s not just one type or color of butterfly either. There are yellow butterflies, leafy looking ones, the Monarchs that everyone knows and all sorts of colors in-between. You’ll discover that some of them are friendlier than others and some prefer to hang out with friends while some like to graze by themselves.  I even saw two of them trying to produce more butterflies, but I let them have their privacy. Most of the butterflies though are not shy and will pose for the camera all day long, or as long as you have one of those paint brushes with sugar water.

Outside of the tent they are selling some butterfly attracting plants that you will not find at your local nursery. We picked up one plant that we had never heard of, but was attracting butterflies like nobody’s business inside the tent.

The Butterfly Encounter really surprised us as to how entertaining it was. We stayed inside the tent for about 30 minutes and only left because there were others outside the tent who wanted to get in. The area accommodates about 25 people at a time and had a good number of people in there the entire time.

Butterfly Encounter is open during normal business hours through July 31. On the weekends they have live butterfly releases on Saturday at 11 AM and 1:30PM and on Sunday at 1:30 and 3:30.