Valentine's Day at the Butterfly Conservatory

The butterflies are back at the American Museum of Natural History and the link below takes you to the butterfly cam there.

Yesterday's visitors during my noon to two volunteer shift included a stylishly dressed, mostly in black, young couple, as if they'd just come from or were off to lunch at an upscale restaurant somewhere in the city. She Asian, he Hispanic or Filipino, not much taller than she was and, from overhearing, pretty knowledgable about butterflies. I didn't pay them much attention. Although it was a slow shift, there were still a few kids who wanted to watch the owl butterfly feed from the orange slice in my hand or have their photo taken in front of the huge Atlas moth spread across a plant trunk. The couple was standing near the glass cabinet where we keep the native species butterfly pupae so lucky visitors can sometimes see an adult butterfly emerge. The guy asked a co-volunteer if he would take a picture of them and handed him a camera. Nothing unusual; happens about a dozen times a shift, but rarely does the requester say "But just wait a second." More rarely still does he reach into his pocket and take out a ring case, still more rarely does he go down on one knee, open the ring case and ask his astonished and completely surprised girlfriend to marry him. In fact, in a shift that had already been spectacular for the wildly active blue morphos darting and flirting throughout the enclosure, I'd have been inclined to say it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment, except that the third volunteer on shift, a ten year volunteer at the conservatory, said later, "I'd only seen that once before."

Can't see their future, of course, but it got launched in great style.

Only?

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/butterflies/cams.php