Our Butterfly field trip

On Monday, we went to the Menagesha Mountain. It is the oldest forest preserve in Africa. It is 400 years old. It took us about an hour to drive to this forest and it was beautiful. There were newly planted pine trees among eucalyptus, cedars and indigenous trees.

As soon as we arrived, we could already see the forest was full of beautiful butterflies which we later found out were called the yellow king swallow tail, sulphur butterfly, etc.

This field trip was for homeschool families in Addis and downcountry and there were about 12 families represented. One of the dads is an expert on butterflies and so he gave an hour teaching time and then we drove to the forest.

His knowledge and enthusiasm was incredible and the walk was beautiful. There were dozens of baboons that were roaming around nearby after our picnic lunch.

We were all pretty tired from field days and our Sunday events but we were so glad that we went. It reminded us somehow of home.

Here are some of the things that we learned:

Kalia: Butterflies have different dances. Each different kind of species has a different dance. It is a mating dance. They find out if it can be their mate if they do the right dance. Males and females do opposite dances. Two males might dance with each other but because their dance is the same, they fly away.

Joel: Butterflies can split their proboscis in half when something gets plugged in this “straw” like banana or something big that they are sucking. Then they use their legs to get the stuck chunk out and then the proboscis closes again.

Ariana: Butterflies have 17,000 eyes and can see in every direction. The eyes are all joined together but have little hairs between them. They can see for 200 metres. They have good smell too. They can smell 5 miles away.

When you hold a butterfly, you should hold the butterfly by holding the 2 wings together at the front of the wings.

Rolf: Butterflies do not only see regular light but also ultraviolet light. On every flower that they drink from, God has put little rows of dots that can only be seen by ultraviolet senses. These dots point the way to the nectar kind of like a runway at night.

Nadia: Butterflies can hide themselves by closing up their wings and camouflaging themselves.