Butterflies emerge as stars of OC Fair exhibit
It’s like a petting zoo for six-legged creatures with wings.
Butterfly wrangler John Dailey spent Wednesday afternoon freeing new butterflies from a chrysalis house and feeding them with nectar-soaked cotton swabs.
The enclosure he works in, SkyRiver Butterflies, is at the Orange County Fair in Costa Mesa after making its way from the Philadelphia Flower Show in March and other events.
The past five years, San Francisco-based SkyRiver Butterflies has taken its traveling exhibits to fairs in San Diego, New York state and elsewhere.
Close to 1,000 of the fluttering creatures are in the enclosure at the OC Fair, along with flowers and pictures showing the stages of a butterfly’s life — being born a caterpillar, the forming of the chrysalis — the hard case that protects the developing pupa — then emerging as a butterfly.
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Whittier resident Jessica Davis and her 3-year-old daughter Jordyn, who wore a butterfly-pattern dress to the exhibit, fed monarch and white peacock butterflies Wednesday afternoon.
“They’re obviously beautiful creatures,” Davis said. “You don’t normally see so many of them out and about like this. [My daughter] loves them.”
Before Dailey got out his drill to open the Plexiglas chrysalis house Wednesday, the newly hatched butterflies inside shook free from their hardened cases, which hung from different levels in the house.
“Today is their birthday,” Dailey told children visiting the exhibit.
After he took off the front wall of the house, Dailey used the feeding sticks — the nectar-soaked swabs — to lure the creatures out one by one.
“Their sense of taste is through their feet,” Dailey said.
Butterflies stuck their legs onto the sticks Dailey held, and some uncurled their proboscis, a thin straw-like body part attached to the head, to drink the nectar off the swabs.
As the butterfly wrangler ventured to different corners of the enclosure to feed more insects with the sticks, he approached two monarch butterflies stuck together on a wall.
But then he quickly turned around.
“Nope, they are honeymooning,” he said while walking away.
According to Dailey, 15 species of butterflies, all from the United States, are in the fairgrounds exhibit, including the malachite butterfly, with green and black wings, and the zebra longwing butterfly, with white stripes.
“Some people aren’t familiar with the anatomy of a butterfly, but this gives them the chance to study them,” SkyRiver employee Baileigh Trotter said.
Brooke Lacey, 16, of Westminster took her 4-year-old nephew to the enclosure. Monarchs flew to Brooke and landed on her hands, shoulders and hair.
“I learned about butterflies in school, but it’s different when you get to hold them,” she said.
As guests left the exhibit, Trotter checked for any stray butterflies, or “hitchhikers,” stuck to clothes or hair.
A sign outside the enclosure reads: “We close when the butterflies sleep.”
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Alex Chan, alexandra.chan@latimes.com
Twitter: @AlexandraChan10
