Butterfly Festival

The annual Butterfly Festival was held at the Springfield Botanical Gardens on the second Saturday in June. I volunteered for 2 hours in the Missouri Master Naturalist booth.

There were a lot of people and the children were all working on a passport where they collected a butterfly sticker from the booths they visited. The sticker we had was the pipevine swallowtail. We were completely out of stickers at the end of my shift and there was still 2 hours to go for the festival!

To the side of our booth, we had a small tarp with rotten logs and tools to dig into the logs. The children found snails, grubs, worms, ants, millipedes, spider…and roly-polies! We accumulated quite a collection in the magnifying containers on the table.

We talked the adults about Missouri Master Naturalists and hopefully some people will be interested enough to contact us and participate in our next core training in fall of 2026.