Visit Stratford's Butterfly Farm
There's more to Stratford-upon-Avon than Shakespeare, and your visit to the Stratford Butterfly Farm helps provide aid to poor families in places including Ecuador, Tanzania, India, China, Kenya and Colombia
The Stratford Butterfly Farm in the heart of Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon helps fight rural poverty in third-world countries by buying butterfly pupae
From time to time I'll feature travel stories for no other reason than that they deserve a pat on the back, and the Stratford Butterfly Farm is definitely one of those. It's in the heart of Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon, right across the River Avon from the Royal Shakespeare Company in the town centre.
It's a wonderful experience in its own right, seeing hundreds of the world's most beautiful and colourful butterflies flying round you in the tropical butterfly garden. But more than that, you'll be pleased to know that your admission money is helping poor families in rural areas to earn an honest living. Each year the Butterfly Farm sends over £400,000 in wages to its overseas suppliers, in countries including Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, Colombia, Sri Lanka, China and Indonesia.
The Stratford Butterfly Farm encourages farmers in some of the world's poorest countries to breed butterflies. A small family in rural Ecuador can make a living by supplying the Butterfly Farm with just 10-20 pupae per week. In some places farming butterflies has become an alternative to a life of drugs or crime. It's also an incentive to keep the rainforests healthy for the wild butterflies, and it's good for the butterflies too. The survival rate in the farms is 50 times better than it is in nature, and a proportion of the stock is released to keep wild numbers healthy.
As well as the tropical butterflies, the Stratford Butterfly Farm has a Caterpillar Room where you can study the life cycle of the butterfly and see some amazing caterpillars. Then there's Arachnoland, with scorpions and spiders including black widows and tarantulas. Insect City includes a colony of leaf-cutter ants, which you can watch marching above your head (safely behind glass, of course!) as they go about their constant leaf-collecting lives. So when you go to see the Bard of Avon, make sure you call in and see the Butterflies of Avon too.
Click here for the Stratford Butterfly Farm website.
And click here to see what there is to do in Shakespeare Country and South Warwickshire at Christmas time
