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Contributed by: Erin Feese/YourHub.com on 5/14/2008

It's hot and sticky in the Butterfly Pavilion's tropical conservatory, and the crowd is getting restless. Parents bounce babies on their knees as they promise impatient kids the butterfly release will happen "any second now."

As the anticipation mounts, pavilion zookeeper Khanh Whiteman emerges with a cage full of fluttering butterflies. She reaches into the cage and gently grasps a bright blue butterfly between two fingers.

"In Costa Rica, they call this the 'jewel of the jungle,'" she says.

With a quick flick of her wrist, she releases the blue morpho into the air amid a chorus of oohs and ahhhs.

The Butterfly Pavilion, 6252 W.104th Ave., Westminster, holds butterfly releases twice daily. Whiteman often has the fun task of gathering the newly emerged butterflies and releasing them into the 7,000-square-foot tropical habitat, which is kept at 80 percent humidity and between 70 and 90 degrees.

"The conservatory is my favorite spot," Whiteman says. "It's a rainforest right in the middle of Colorado."

Whiteman earned a degree in biology from West Virginia Wesleyan College before working at a zoo in Memphis, Tenn. After moving to Westminster, she got a job at the pavilion and has worked there for about a year.

Whiteman's smile and enthusiasm for the job are contagious, and visitors pepper her with questions as she monitors the conservatory.

"What do the butterflies eat?"

"Where do they sleep?"

"But what happens when a butterfly dies?"

This question is the one she receives most often. She says the staff rarely finds deceased butterflies on the conservatory's paths; the butterflies just seem to know when they are going to die, and retreat to a secluded location amid the shrubbery. They are left there to decompose.

"It's really natural in here," Whiteman says of the conservatory, which houses 350 plant species, 15 turtles, two doves, fish and frogs, in addition to about 1,200 butterflies.

Butterflies have a lifespan of two to four weeks. The Butterfly Pavilion purchases about 500 butterfly chrysalids each week from butterfly farms located in rainforests around the world, Whiteman says.

"Just by coming here, you are supporting butterfly farmers," she says.

When the chrysalids arrive, staff members carefully unpack them and hang them neatly in rows in the conservatory's emergence center. Onlookers can watch with awe as the butterflies break free from their chrysalids and prepare to take flight.

When Whiteman is not caring for butterflies, she works in the pavilion's other stations, which include an under-the-sea petting zoo and a creepy-crawly exhibit with scorpions, leaf insects, giant millipedes and Rosie, a Chilean rosehair tarantula that visitors can hold.

"People who come in with fears (of spiders) are the ones we reach the most," Whiteman says. "Rosie is as docile as can be. People get to hold her and they realize, 'Oh, she's really cool!'"

There are nearly 100 tarantulas that play the part of Rosie, used not only for the pavilion's touch station, but also for numerous outreaches to schools, elderly homes, functions and classrooms, Whiteman says.

Whiteman says her favorite part of the job is the educational aspect, particularly about conservation. Butterflies around the world are having their habitats destroyed, she says.

"I enjoy the opportunity to connect people with a reason to conserve the rainforest habitat," she says.

Whiteman recently took a trip to San Jose, Costa Rica, to see the Spirogyra Butterfly Garden. The garden in Costa Rica is filled with many of the same species as the pavilion's conservatory, Whiteman says.

Spirogyra helps preserve the rainforest by allowing local families to make a living in butterfly farming, as opposed to lumbering, so "it is a powerful start to forming a solution" to forest destruction, Whiteman says.

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