VOA常速英语:亚利桑那州的蝴蝶仙境

It’s a bright and sunny morning in Scottsdale, Arizona here at Butterfly Wonderland.
So butterfly wonderland conservatory is 10,000 square feet of tropical paradise in the middle of the Sonoran Desert.
We always have at least 70 different species of butterflies from all over the world.
They come from tropical Africa, Southeast Asia, Central and South America.
And we get the North American butterflies from Florida.
I appreciate even the smallest of creatures and their role in the ecosystem overall.
When you watch butterflies in action, they just always look like they’re having so much fun with not a care in the world.

And really they don’t, because their brains, well, are very small.
And they say the average lifespan for a butterfly is two weeks.
The lifespan in here is extended because the conditions are perfect.
There’s plenty of sunshine.The weather’s always good.
There’s lots of food and no predators.
The UV light that we get here is so intense,
and it really drives the activity of the butterflies,
and it supports all of the plants.
And what it does is it creates an environment that is so inspiring and so beautiful that people are literally awestruck when they first come in here.
But then it makes them very receptive to learning about this ecosystem and how it kind of represents areas of our tropical world.
Good morning ladies!
So those butterflies are actually feeding on a very special concoction we call "banana brew".
And we make it here out of overripe bananas, and dark beer and sugar.
That’s a real butterfly party.
And we do also have two chickens.
They’re really important for pest control inside the conservatory.
Well, butterflies are pollinators.They are now studying the structure of the scales on the wings.
So without any scales at all, a butterfly’s wings are transparent, totally clear.
The way the light hits it and is reflected, is what gives them their color.
So, those blue butterflies that just flew past here are not really blue at all.
There’s some fun behavior.I don’t know if you can get that.When you get a number of them together, that swirling around and chasing each other, that’s actually two males.
So, it kind of looks like a courtship dance, but it’s really more of a territorial display.
To maintain a conservatory like this in the middle of the desert takes a lot of monitoring.
I spend a lot of my day making sure that the temperature is right,
the humidity is right, the evaporative coolers are working, the mist system is coming on when it should.
Every day that I come into work is a pleasure for me.
I feel like one of the luckiest people in the world, and people mention this every day.
They say, ’oh you have such a great job’.
And I say, ’ yeah I really do,’ because I do I’m so lucky.