Children’s Zoo interpreter, Gerald Bogan, magnifies a Gulf fritillary butterfly.
“Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
Did you know that a butterfly’s wings are full of tiny hairs? Or that the veins of a leaf look a lot like the ones in your body? Or that the richly colored eye spot on a polythemus moth’s rear wing is used to confuse predators?
Henry David Thoreau had an eye for nature, but he couldn’t have dreamed of this type of detail.
A new state-of-the-art microscope is taking nature discovery to another level at the Nature Exchange in the Lacerte Family Children’s Zoo. Purchased 
with grant money from the M.R. and Evelyn Hudson Foundation, the $4,600 microscope has been on our “wish list” for many years. Now, children can see the natural world clearer and closer than ever before.
“We wouldn’t have been able to afford it without the grant,” said Children’s Zoo supervisor Melody Wood. “This microscope lets children develop a connection to their environment. In turn, we hope they’ll grow up to become stewards of the natural world.”
The Nature Exchange is a natural item swap shop, where children bring in things they’ve found in their yard and trade up for cooler natural items.
When the kids bring their items in, now they can see them magnified with the microscope and beamed up onto a 48-inch LED Smart HDTV.
“We use the microscope to magnify things like snake skin, insects, rocks, micro fossils and more,” said Ryan Wies, Children’s Zoo specialist. “This makes it more fun, because they’re part of the discovery process and they take more away from it.”
If your children don’t have natural items to swap, we highly suggest checking out all the neat things we already have. We’ll put anything you want under the microscope, if it fits!
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