Butterfly Zoo - Mariposario of Machu Picchu

About this audio guide

This guide to the Butterfly Zoo, or Wasi Pillpi, above Aguas Calientes follows the morpho butterfly's trick of flashing electric blue in flight and vanishing into dead-leaf brown the instant it lands, and the owl butterfly's fake giant eyes that bluff hungry birds into backing off. It covers the caretaker, Leonardo Serrano Gutierrez, and volunteers who breed dozens of cloud-forest species from egg to open wing, part of the roughly one in ten butterfly species on Earth found in Peru. Look into the nursery cases and you can watch chrysalises cracking open in real time.