Wild Americas - Part 10 (Final): Butterflies & Reindeers

This is the tenth installment in a series of posts touring my British zoo, named Wild Americas. You can read an introduction for it here.

In this final update (for now), I'm going to show the Butterfly House and the reindeer enclosure. Let's begin with the Butterfly House as it's nearer to where we left off at the armadillos:




The Butterfly House is a new greenhouse at the park but it's naturally a lot smaller than the other ones. You enter it via a wooden shed, which I based off this image I took at Lakeland Wildlife Oasis:



The shed contains a foyer which acts like an airlock with two PVC curtains to prevent butterflies from escaping. Before you enter the greenhouse part, you can get a glimpse through a window where I've added a butterfly chrysalis box / hatchery. I got the idea from Tropical World but I've seen it repeated at other butterfly houses I've visited:









I based the interior of the Butterfly House partly on the one at The Garden of Spring Creek, Colorado. The main difference with my version is that it only has a single path that doesn't loop:






The Butterfly House is home to four species that are found in the Americas, namely Old World swallowtail, Menelaus blue morpho, clouded sulphur and monarch. The walkthrough exhibit "facility" is a little larger than I would like it to be, so the butterflies do sometimes flutter outside of the glass roof, but that's something I can live with. I really didn't want to build anything larger than this as I feel this size suits the zoo more:



Last but not least, we have the reindeer enclosure. I actually built this in December to get into the festive spirit but the rest of the expansion wasn't ready at the time, so I didn't show it. I didn't want to do anything too fancy for the reindeers because they're rarely exhibited in an extravagant way at most real zoos:






There's a small herd of four individuals which live in the grassy paddock. They also have access to their own housing on the side:



The enclosure is double-fenced as I noticed a lot of real-life reindeer enclosures either had tall fencing or low double-fencing, possibly due to the animal's size and their antlers:

And that's the end of your walkthrough tour of Wild Americas... for now. I plan on keeping the project open with the hope that we get some more American animals in future DLCs. I'm praying for some birds or some New World monkeys. Until then, thank you for visiting!

Comments

  1. Hey! I love your work, I discovered it on YouTube. Would it be possible to visit the park through a link on the Steam Workshop?

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