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Naturalists and the public from around the country took part in the Texas Butterfly Festival this weekend.
Families, naturalists, and birders could be found in any direction on the festival’s Community Day. The National Butterfly Center in Mission, just a few hundred feet from the U.S-Mexico, is the site of the festival.
For 27 years, the event has brought together generations of Rio Grande Valley families to learn about the area’s flora and fauna.
Marianna Treviño-Wright said the first day of the festival was for the Rio Grande Valley community.
“Even though our admission for Valley residents is very low, that can still be a gate or a barrier to entry for some people,” she told TPR as she welcomed visitors. “So we invite them all out during this always beautiful time of year. When the plants are in bloom, the butterflies are in bloom, and we eliminate that barrier altogether.”
Nearly 250 species of wild, free-roaming butterflies have been found at the National Butterfly Center. During Community Day, on Nov. 4, visitors saw more than 60 species within the first few hours of the center opening. It has one of the most diverse populations of butterflies in North America.
Treviño-Wright noted the native plants that attract pollinators, like butterflies, to the National Butterfly Center are why so many species can be found there.
“We want people to come and see that if you plant for the butterflies, they will come,” she said. “They will find your garden, they will make it more beautiful. They will pollinate our native grasses and wildflowers, shrubs and trees and continue to enhance the environment in every way.”
Dennis Fravel and his wife, Lydia, both serious butterfly watchers, came down from Washington, D.C., to see butterflies they wouldn’t normally see, at least not as frequently. Species like Queen butterflies, a rarity on the East Coast, are all over South Texas, and they took up their attention.
“We have a lot of invasive plants,” Fravel said. “So the invasive plants come in and they smother the small plants. They preclude biodiverse plant power, you could say. And so with that, nothing much grows there for insects at all. It's not just butterflies.”
The Texas Butterfly Festival, which included guided butterfly tours around the Rio Grande Valley, concludes on Tuesday.
The National Butterfly Center is open year-round from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
