At Santa Barbara Natural History Museum, ‘Butterflies Alive!’ Flutters into Season

Walking the grounds of the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum is, by any account, a year-round pleasure. Past Chad (a blue whale skeleton) and the halls of exhibits, one finds themselves tucked behind the grounds of the Santa Barbara Mission, hidden among mighty oak trees and a trickling creek, while the towers of the St. Anthony’s peek from above the foliage. However, in summer, the museum is graced by more than warm weather: the shimmering colors of butterflies in the annual Butterflies Alive! exhibit.

At Butterflies Alive!, which will run through September 4, the museum’s Sprague Butterfly Pavilion hosts more than two dozen Costa Rican butterfly species. The popular exhibit allows guests to step into a bountiful grove of color, both in the fluttering insects in bright blue, green, and yellow, along with the flowering flora that house the tropical guests. As a result, the experience is unlike most museum fare. While most exhibits are kept behind panes of glass, in the butterfly pavilion a bright-green malachite might pop out of the sky and land on your shoulder. More experiential than instructive, Butterflies Alive! demonstrates the immediate and inexplicable magic in nature, as undeniable as it is thrilling.

Jimmy Friery, the museum’s butterfly coordinator, oversees more than 1,000 butterflies of a dozen different species, tending to them from their arrival to Santa Barbara as chrysalises to their blossoming in the Sprague Pavilion. Fittingly clad in a butterfly tee and hat, Friery spoke of this year’s herd with the reverence of a shepherd.