Butterflies Aren't Free.

Farming winged creatures is a burgeoning business in Costa Rica.

THEY DON'T LOOK LIKE MUCH, THESE DRIED LEAVES AND TWIGS carefully being packed into boxes between layers of cotton. But don't be fooled by appearances--these aren't dried leaves and twigs. These are live butterfly pupae. Inside what looks like a withered leaf is a fragile heliconius hecale waiting to emerge. The broken twig is the disguise of the giant black and yellow swallowtail.

This is export day at the Butterfly Farm, a commercial butterfly operation on the outskirts of San Jose and the longest-running and largest such farm in Latin America. Within 48 hours, some 2,500 chrysalises will be arriving at such destinations as the San Diego Wild Animal Park Callaway Gardens in Florida and the Niagara Falls Butterfly Conservatory in Ontario. During March and the rest of the seven-month busy season, two such shipments will go out each week.

Talk about a non-traditional export. Bananas, coffee, maybe even microchips come to mind when one thinks of Costa Rica. But butterfly pupae? While Southeast Asia was the first region to begin breeding butterflies for exhibit, Latin American butterflies have begun to overtake their eastern counterparts in popularity due to the high quality of the region's pupae producers and the beauty of the butterflies.

Within the hemisphere, Costa Rica is the largest butterfly supplier, exporting more than 300,000 pupae a year. That's not surprising, given that Costa Rica's diverse microclimates are home to 5% of the 20,000 species known to man. Packed into an area the size of West Virginia, 120 of these species are exported.

Orgy of color. Not all the pupae survive the journey. But the 90% or so that do will be released into carefully managed jungle-scapes enclosed by everything from modest wood and screen houses to towering glass pyramids. The transplanted butterflies will live a short but good life--sipping sugar water to their hearts' content, feasting on rotting fruit, soaking up the suns' rays and having sex, lots of sex--all while the butterfly-bedazzled tourist looks on, doggedly trying to capture the fluttering beauties with a point-and-shoot camera.

"Zoos and natural history museums have done panda bears and lions. Now they're looking for what's next," says Maria Sabido, who owns the farm with her husband, Joris Brinkerhoff. "Butterfly exhibits are one of the few places in a zoo where people can actually enter the animal kingdom."

Sabido pauses to watch a stunning, iridescent-blue morpho peleides complete its seventh topsy-turvy lap across the mesh ceiling of the farm's butterfly house. Prized by exhibitors, the morpho sells for US$4.50 apiece--twice the price of the average butterfly.

It can be a very emotional experience to walk through an exhibit and have a big blue morpho alight on your shoulder,"' adds Brinkerhoff. "Butterfly exhibits recreate the remarkable beauty of the tropics--something unimaginable."

Brinkerhoff says the country's half dozen farms, fed by a network of independent breeders several hundred strong, bring in $1 million each year with their strange crop and souvenir-related byproducts. Because many of these farms have their own exhibits, while another half dozen establishments have exhibits but don't farm, the colorful "flowers of the sky" account for another $500,000 a year in tourism.

Even some innovative hotels and restaurants have opened exhibits, cashing in on the mania that has manifested itself in everything from butterfly hair clips and headbands to Martha Stewart cookie cutters. Instead of throwing rice, the latest fashion in the States is to release butterflies at one's wedding.

The Niagara Falls Butterfly Conservatory has received some 2 million visitors since opening three years ago, while the butterfly gift shop at San Diego Wildlife Park is the second most profitable in the zoo. A global figure is hard to pinpoint, but entomologist Michael Weissmann, a consultant to butterfly buyers, estimates the live butterfly trade at $5 million.

How did this butterfly mania begin? A man on the island of Guernsey, which is located in the English Channel, started the first public butterfly exhibit in 1976, according to butterfly farmer Sabido. Although the island has always been a popular destination for British tourists, at that time growth was lagging. Meanwhile, Guernsey's tomato industry had gone bankrupt and acres of greenhouses were sitting idle. Despite the skepticism of his colleagues, the Guernsey man's greenhouse-turned-butterfly-exhibit quickly became a success.

Just one word: butterflies. The Guernsey butterfly house sparked a slew of small, mainly private butterfly exhibits. But when Butterfly World opened the first butterfly exhibit in the United States in 1988, the stakes of the business changed. Each zoo or natural history museum tried to outdo the exhibit that had opened before it, spending millions of dollars on elaborate fairytale jungles complete with cascading waterfalls and, in the case of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, recreated Mayan temple carvings.

In Costa Rica, Brinkerhoff got the idea for the Butterfly Farm when a man who picked him up hitchhiking began telling him about his peculiar hobby. A Peace Corps volunteer at the time, Brinkerhoff knew nothing about butterflies, but soon began auditing an entomology class at the University of Costa Rica. Sabido met the New Hampshire native while researching her master's thesis on non-traditional exports. A couple of weeks before her three-month visit was scheduled to end, Sabido called her parents to tell them she was staying in Costa Rica to marry a butterfly farmer.

Sabido says that when they first started exporting in 1985, there was no one else in Latin America doing it. Today, there are more than 200 shows worldwide, although fewer than two dozen of these are large, year-round exhibits. Because breeders can establish themselves for as little as $500, suppliers are beginning to outstrip demand. Butterfly farms can be found around the world in such locations as Belize, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Peru and Suriname. For a small country like Costa Rica, this means more butterfly growers, each claiming a piece of the shrinking pie.

Growing competition has led Mario Polsa, owner of Butterfly Paradise, to divert most of his efforts to producing handicrafts like mounted, encased butterflies for display on desks or walls. Seven years ago, Polsa says he was exporting 40,000 butterflies a year. Now that number has been halved. Sol Carballo Bolanos, owner of Spirogyra Butterfly Garden, agrees that business is tough. A butterfly that sells for $2.50 leaves her only a 50-cent profit, and exhibitors don't pay for deformed pupae or pupae that don't hatch, she says.

"No one raising butterflies in Costa Rica is going to become rich. But it is a way of making money without hurting the environment, and an alternative to household chores," says Environment Ministry official Jorge Hernandez, noting that many independent breeders are women. Hernandez says the ministry is distributing twice as many permits as it did five years ago.

Despite the country's reputation for conservation, deforestation continues to be a problem in Costa Rica. So, although its overall impact is minimal, butterfly farming, by giving rural Costa Ricans an alternative to slash-and-burn agriculture, is a powerful example of sustainable development. Because the occupation is less labor intensive than traditional agriculture and yields a comparable income, many households leave farming entirely, keeping only a corner of their yards cleared for the butterfly house and letting the rest of the land return to forest.

Flying ambassadors. "The main difference butterfly farms and exhibits make is through education," entomologist Weissmann says. "The butterflies serve as ambassadors for the tropical forests in much the same way the giant pandas have been for the threatened bamboo forests of Asia."

In the wild, butterflies have only a 10% survival rate. In captivity, these odds are reversed. Still, Costa Rica's ranks of butterfly breeders, all of whom fell into the strange occupation by chance, maintain that those who succeed and stick with butterfly farming do it for love. "It's like raising kids. You need to feed them and keep them clean and healthy," Spirogyra Butterfly Garden's Bolanos says.