Fun in the City...

We had a great Saturday in Halifax. It is a fun city... especially on a beautiful sunny day!

First stop was the whole reason for the trip to town... the Museum of Natural History...

The reptile and amphibian exhibit right at the entrance is always a fun stop...

Even more so now that we have been finding toads in the woods and around the house...
Checking it all out...

The next stop was the Butterfly exhibit...
This is the chamber where they keep the chrysalis before they hatch out....

The interpreter later told us that they bring this into the enclosure twice a day to let the butterflies that have emerged fly out...

All of the butterflies come to the museum in this form...
Dylan was having lots of fun spotting those amazing flyers...
We all had a few land on us... Great fun...
It was great to see them so close... The ones around the yard have been fast and elusive...
They really liked Wes... Guess it's cuz he's so sweet!!

This black and dark blue one was so still and a wonderful model...
Fionna was having too much fun observing... and doing some touching... a no no but the interpreter was great about it..

As I mentioned the interpreter was very nice and spent a lot of time with Fionna. We were fortunate in that we had the exhibit to ourselves...

Fionna was finding some that had come to the end of their short lifespan... Eventually the interpreter was calling Fionna her little butterfly mortician... She did show Fionna the little container where she kept the dead butterflies and told us that they have to incinerate them and at the end of the exhibit all of the plants too since these are tropical and therefore exotic species. Fionna and I spent a good amount of time with the butterflies... while to boys headed out to do some more exploring...

When we finally caught up with them there were lots of cool things to see...
The bees were really active on this warm sunny day... It was fun to watch them coming into the hive through the tube that leads outside...

They also had a very neat new exhibit on salt... including information about how it is mined...

Dylan was in heaven... which meant we could actually go around a read some interesting things about salt!

After the museum and a yummy lunch at Henry House we walked down to the park...

Dylan is always up for a swing....
And Fionna spent most of her time exploring the perimeter among the trees... discovering maple pods and feathers... Finding nature in the middle of the big city!

It was a good Saturday!