Week 9: When I’m Not on a Tour

I have written a lot about the tours I take, since I often learn some very interesting things about the museum. But I do actually work here, and thought I might talk about that this week. My day at the museum generally consists of helping with any extra lab or animal prep that needs to be done in the morning, working on my independent project, occasionally helping to pin the chrysalides that come in during the week, and helping with whatever miscellaneous project needs help. On Wednesdays, the lab work includes coming in early and helping change out all of the plants in the Butterfly Pavilion.

I may have mentioned this earlier, but the Smithsonian is not licensed to breed any of the butterflies on display. This means that every plant that leaves the pavilion, and any dead butterflies, must be frozen for 72 hours before being thrown away. So all of the plants that are changed out every week are double bagged and brought on metal carts through a maze of three different freight elevators and down several back hallways to a large walk-in freezer that is stored in an old men’s bathroom (clearly no longer functioning, but the baby blue tile and mirrors remain.) This freezer is in the farthest back and most hidden corner of the museum I have ever found (and I have spent a lot of time exploring this building.)

The fact that the museum is not allowed to breed the butterflies also means that they must receive constant shipments of chrysalides from breeders around the world. Butterflies have an average life span of about two weeks; in order to keep the population in the pavilion going, there are usually at least two boxes of new chrysalides that come in each week. They come wrapped in paper towels with a label. We lay them out and pin each chrysalis to a foam board, which is then displayed so that visitors can watch the butterflies emerge (I am not as good at pinning as one of the other interns, so she tends to get this duty.)

I also spend a fair amount of time at the back of the butterfly pavilion. Because there are many exotic species kept in the pavilion it is very important that no butterflies escape into DC. So everyone who works in the butterfly pavilion takes an hour or two of back door duty, which involves letting visitors out into a vestibule with a mirrored wall and helping them check themselves over for any hitchhiking butterflies. There are a few caught every day that get placed into a box in the vestibule for reintroduction to the pavilion at the end of the day. I had quite a few children look over and very excitedly cry, “Look mommy! That butterfly is in time out!” Occasionally, someone from the education department helps by taking a shift at the back door to free up the Butterfly Pavilion staff (and once even the Director of the museum came down for a shift.) One side effect of this job is that those of us who do it regularly find ourselves obsessively scanning people’s backpacks on the Metro platform, checking for butterflies.