They Chose Me
- Glen Sealy
- Jun 5
- 5 min read
April 2026 | Hall Place Butterfly House, Bexleyheath
We went to Hall Place for the butterflies.
This is important to say, because by the time the afternoon was over, we had also encountered owls, been educated beyond what we expected, and come home carrying considerably more than we arrived with. But the butterflies came first. They were the reason we were there.
My daughter Ashley, a brand strategist, filmmaker and photographer, lasted approximately ten minutes inside the butterfly house. In that time she managed to capture the best shots of me for the afternoon, take a client call, and decide that the combination of a developing flu headache and tropical humidity was not a professional environment she was willing to sustain. She retreated to cooler air to finish her call, and left me entirely alone with several dozen tropical butterflies who, it quickly became apparent, had opinions about me specifically.
The first thing you notice, walking into a space like this, is the air. It hits you before anything else, warm, green, faintly sweet, the particular humidity of somewhere that has been kept deliberately tropical for the benefit of creatures that would otherwise be thousands of miles away. Your eyes adjust slowly. And then things begin to move.
Everywhere.
All at once. Wings catching the filtered light from the glass ceiling above, colours that have no business being so vivid, patterns that make no sense until you understand exactly what they're designed to do.
Before any of them landed on me, I stood and watched the chrysalis rack near the entrance. Dozens of them, hanging in careful rows, each one a different stage of the same impossible process. The freshest ones are vivid, waxy green. Others darker, more translucent, the shape of wings visible through the casing. A few emptied, split at the seam, job done. The full journey from caterpillar to butterfly takes roughly two to four weeks, depending on species, and here it was, all of it, suspended in a single frame. The before, the during, and the after, hanging quietly together on blue rods while the finished article flew in circles around my head.
The species inside were extraordinary in their variety.
Owl Butterfly resting on the trunks of tropical plants, those enormous false eyes staring out from their underwings; a defence mechanism so effective it has survived millions of years of evolution, the wing patterning mimicking the face of a predator convincingly enough to give a bird pause.
Blue Morphos hanging from leaves with wings folded, the iridescent blue of their upper surface hidden until they opened, then suddenly there, a colour so vivid it seems almost structural rather than pigmented, because it is. The blue is not a dye. It is light itself, refracted through microscopic structures in the wing scales. Close the wing and it disappears.
Tiger Longwings working the flowering plants with methodical focus, their bold orange and black patterning a warning rather than a display; I am toxic, it says, I have been toxic for long enough that every predator in my ecosystem learned to leave me alone.
A Malachite with those extraordinary lime green panels, a Monarch feeding on a cluster of orange and red blooms, a Crimson Rose so deeply black with red crescents it looked like something from a jeweller's cabinet rather than a living creature.
And feeding dishes placed throughout the space, piled with overripe bananas and halved oranges, butterflies covering every surface in overlapping layers, proboscises extended, completely absorbed. Because this is what most people don't realise: many adult butterflies don't feed on nectar at all. They feed on fruit sugars, tree sap, mineral-rich moisture from soil, sometimes the salts in animal perspiration or skin.
By the time my daughter had retreated, three butterflies had used me as a perch, and more were on their way.
There are practical reasons for this. Human skin is warm, and butterflies are ectothermic; they regulate their body temperature using external heat sources, and a warm human in a warm room is simply a good surface to land on. We also produce salt and minerals through our skin, things butterflies actively seek out and find useful. The colour of clothing matters too; bright colours and floral patterns trigger the same responses as flowers. And then there is stillness. Butterflies avoid movement. Staying calm and quiet, not flinching, not reaching for them, makes you a safer landing place than someone who startles.
I did not reach for them. I did not stay still. They made their own decisions.
A Paper Kite landed on my head and stayed there long enough for Ash to capture it properly before she retreated to the cooler world outside. After she left, I was on my own with the iPhone, which became necessary for a very specific reason: before you leave a butterfly house, you are asked to check carefully that no butterflies have come with you. Standing at the exit, turning slowly, holding your arms out; it is a reasonable precaution and also, with a butterfly on your shoulder, a genuinely tricky piece of coordination. The iPhone footage is more impressionistic than documentary. The butterflies were not interested in my documentation difficulties. They had their own agenda.
What I kept thinking about, standing there being slowly colonised, was how far these animals had come to be in that room. Not the individuals — most had been bred in the butterfly house itself, hatched from those chrysalises on the rack near the entrance. But their ancestors were from Central and South America, from Southeast Asia, from the rainforests and cloud forests that produced the extraordinary biodiversity on display in those wings. The butterfly house is, in a small but genuine way, an argument for those places. For their protection. For the understanding that what happens in a rainforest thousands of miles away has a relationship to the creature currently investigating your cardigan.
Butterflies are in serious trouble globally. Habitat loss, pesticide use, climate change disrupting the timing of flowering plants and larval food sources — the pressures are the same ones that affect bees and owls and every other species we've been writing about this year. In the UK alone, three quarters of butterfly species have declined over the past four decades. The ones in this room will never fly free, but the people who leave this room knowing their names, understanding something about how they work and why they matter, might make slightly different choices than they would have otherwise.
That is the point of a place like this. Education first, wonder second, or perhaps the other way around. Either way, both at once.
I stayed for just under an hour in total, which felt both too long and not nearly long enough. There were too many things to look at. Too many wings catching the light in ways I wanted to understand. Too many creatures going about their business with complete indifference to whether I found them remarkable, which of course made me find them more remarkable.
The same afternoon, we found the owls. That story has already been told in two parts.
But it started here, in the warmth, with a Paper Kite on my head and a Blue Morpho opening and closing its wings on a banana, and Ashl outside finishing her client call, flu headache and all, rather pleased with the photographs she'd taken before retreating.
Ash got the best ones of me that day, and you can find her work at @whatabouttheash.
Shot in April 2026 at Hall Place Butterfly House, Bexleyheath. Species including Blue Morpho (Morpho peleides), Owl Butterfly (Caligo sp.), Tiger Longwing (Heliconius hecale), Malachite (Siproeta stelenes), Monarch (Danaus plexippus), and Crimson Rose (Pachliopta hector).
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