Fairchild Tropical Garden Spring Festival

 Fairchild Tropical Garden has a wonderful butterfly conservatory featuring butterflies throughout the world, but the garden itself has many wild butterflies of interest, including this Atala caterpillar on Zamia.

 It is also one of the best places to see the Atala butterfly.  Here's an adult feeding on saw palmetto flowers, one of their favorite plants.  The Atala is an imperiled species and one of our most beautiful butterflies.

There are a number of unusual exotic lizards living here, including the Red Agama.  They are strikingly big but shy.  They were fairly common there, and grew to be about ten inches long.