It might be 20 degrees out with a stiff wind coming down from the north, but in the Judy Istock Butterfly Haven at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum it’s a comfortable 80 degrees and alive with the magic of butterflies. Upon entering the Butterfly Haven, visitors are greeted with the gentle sound of a waterfall and more than 500 colorful butterflies fluttering around the lush 2,700 square foot, three-story greenhouse.
"There’s an old wives’ tale that when a butterfly lands on you it’s good luck," said Kurt Krahn, one of the volunteer museum naturalists. "And I tell the kids that."
The Judy Istock Butterfly Haven is by far the biggest attraction of the Nature Museum, which opened in October. Inside, visitors can actually watch a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis.
"[The Butterfly Haven] is my favorite area, especially working with the school groups," Krahn said. "The kids are completely intrigued by the butterflies. One of the groups [today] got to see a monarch come out of the chrysalis. It’s a great way to see how the butterflies need to dry and pump fluids through their wings as well as how long it takes before they can fly."
Visitors can learn more about butterflies after they leave the haven by paying attention to the Nature Museum’s reading materials. For instance, the monarch butterfly will migrate each fall from as far north as Canada all the way down to Mexico, some 2,500 miles away. The butterflies travel an estimated twenty to fifty miles a day for up to 125 days. Visitors can also look at butterflies with the aid of a magnifying glass.
"We want to develop an exhibit in the museum in a couple of years on the monarch migration and the impact people have on the monarch’s habitat," said Lew Crampton, president of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, which developed the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. "While the monarch butterfly is not an endangered species, the migration is a threatened phenomenon because of habitat loss."
Situated on an ancient sand dune that was once the shore of Lake Michigan, the museum is located at 2430 N. Cannon Drive, just across Fullerton Parkway from the Lincoln Park Zoo. The very design of the museum evokes the natural world. The museum’s entrance resembles a giant, dried-up ravine with its pale, Wisconsin limestone floor and wide-open space. Even the angular, asymmetrical shape of the building echoes the continually shifting appearance of nature itself.
"With the construction of this museum the Chicago Academy of Sciences has turned itself inside out," Crampton said. "Before, we were much more of an academic and scholarly place. Now we are public facility. We’re less academic and much more in a teaching mode, making science more accessible to the average person."
The idea of education stands at the very heart of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. On any given weekday, school buses can be seen pulling up to the museum and unloading children from elementary school on up through high school. During the month of November 1999, more than 2,500 schoolchildren visited the museum.
"In our second grade class we have been studying animals and habitat," said Lara Pruitt, a second grade teacher at the Audubon School in Chicago. "So we’ve been looking at some of the different habitats and the animals who live there. We also do life cycles. We have tadpoles turning into frogs in our classroom, so we looked at the butterflies. It was really exciting, too, while we were watching the chrysalis, one of the butterflies actually came out. The kids thought it was magic."
The museum’s educational outreach also includes going directly into classrooms via the Internet. The NEC Corporation awarded the museum a grant to take their on-line program CAoS [Chicago Academy of Sciences] nationwide. The program is designed to give science lessons about chemistry, biology, ecology, and water and air pollution. The broadcasts, which feature live demonstrations, reach classrooms three days a week. The museum wants to bring CAoS to all fifty states by the end of July 2000, Crampton said.
The museum also wants to help visitors understand that nature is not something that can be separated from our everyday lives.
"Nature is all around us, even in our houses," Crampton said. "We have all kinds of little ecologies going on in them: rats, mice, ants, termites, microbes, and a whole host of other things. The exhibits are to help people understand that there are ecosystems in the city."
Exhibits like City Science and the C. Paul Johnson Family Water Lab show visitors how development and even our own houses effect the environment surrounding us. The water lab includes a 75-foot model of the Chicago River. Along the model river there is an agricultural landscape, a city landscape, and a wooded landscape. A rain machine illustrates how stripping trees from the land causes run-off, which in turn creates the problem of nonpoint source pollution.
"Of the 450 river watershed areas that are defined as threatened in the state of Illinois, 400 of them are threatened because of this nonpoint pollution that is run-off from agricultural sources, herbicides and pesticides, and urban areas where you have parking lots and construction sites," Crampton said. "As you travel on roads you have metals and other pollutants coming out of the exhaust and when it rains the rain washes it into the rivers and streams."
The City Science exhibit, which is a life-size model of a two-story house, further illustrates how the choices we make in our daily lives have an immediate and sometimes lasting impact on the environment. Everything from the source of our electricity to the problem of managing our trash is addressed in the exhibit.
"This is all about people making the right choices about their lifestyle," Crampton said. "In fact, most of the environmental problems we are dealing with today are discreet, scattered, and individual, more than they are the huge point sources that created the big problems in the past. This museum is here to help educate people about what good choices are, especially children at an early age."
To reinforce this, the museum, in conjunction with the City of Chicago, will be putting a series of solar panels on its roof to help supplement the museum’s power supply.
"We’re also building a little greenhouse to grow plants for the Butterfly Haven and so we’ll power that greenhouse, heat it, and light it with solar panels," Crampton said.
The museum also has a 5000-square-foot area set aside for temporary exhibitions. Recently, this huge space was filled by "Microbes: Invisible Invaders/Amazing Allies," which Linda Garrett and her six-year-old son Matthew investigated on their first trip to the museum.
"We came specifically for the microbes exhibit," Garrett said. "Matthew seems to really be enjoying the museum."
Matthew agreed. "The museum is a great place," he said, picking up a magnifying glass and looking at a pillbug in the museum’s permanent exhibit on isopods. "I want to take a closer look at the roly-polies," he added enthusiastically.
As for the future, the museum has several big projects planned. The next traveling exhibit is called "A Question of Truth." It opens February 4 and runs through April 30, and addresses the issue of cultural bias in science.
"Science, as a field, was developed almost exclusively in Europe by white males," Crampton said. "This exhibit illustrates navigation, health, and the way other cultures approach these phenomena. What’s important to remember is that there are a number of different scientific approaches to things. The concern is if you ignore what’s going on in other cultures, you begin to take your own for granted and you tend to denigrate the others."
If visitors are looking for something a little more wild, they can check out the museum’s famous dioramas along the wilderness walk. Ever since its original location in the neoclassical Matthew Laflin Building at Clark Street and Armitage, the academy has gained a national reputation for its three-dimensional scenes of nature. There are four different environments that visitors walk through, each offering a 360-degree experience filled with the plants, animals, and sounds of the Midwest savanna, woodland, tall-grass prairie, and Lake Michigan sand dunes.
"The wilderness walk is all about connecting with our community," said Tina Nolan, a museum educator. "The natural communities that existed long before Chicago was Chicago." It’s a little like taking a trip back to the way Chicago was when Joliet and Marquette explored this area in the late 1600s.
"In the old building, we were known for our dioramas, but they were essentially two-dimensional and visitors had to look at them behind glass," Crampton said. "Now you are right in the middle of it all. Here, in the savanna, you have a deer about to munch on some ironweed. These are designed to get people in touch with how the savannas and woodland areas looked before they fell to either the farmer’s plow or the developers’ bulldozers."
And once visitors finish going through these environmental displays, they can look at maps to see where these environments still exist in Illinois.
After exploring the inside of the museum, there is the nature trail outside. Five different informational kiosks are placed along the path telling visitors what is happening in the various habitats the museum has planted. Along the walk, there is a miniature tall-grass prairie, as well as a butterfly garden filled with plants like milkweed to attract butterflies in the summer. There is also the long promenade of the bird walk two stories up that sits at nest height. In spring, birds build their nests in the nearby trees allowing visitors a perfect view.
In the next three years, the museum is hoping to develop an exhibit that will help people understand the weather. The museum wants to set up its own weather station that will track the weather coming into Chicago as well as the effect Chicago, especially as a heat island in summer, has on the area’s climate.
In addition, the museum’s permanent exhibit "Ameritech Environmental Central" is expected to be up and running early next year. Visitors form groups of five and they work together to try and solve a computer-simulated environmental crisis.
Because the museum is so new, there is still some fine-tuning to do, such as completing the "Environmental Central" exhibit. But over all, the museum has been a tremendous success.
"I think the museum is the most wonderful idea — to have filled the museum with nature from the Midwest and the prairie," said Ursula Selby, a volunteer naturalist at the museum. "This is Illinois, this is our area. That’s what I find exciting about the museum."
Hours and Fees:
Adults: $7, Seniors: $5, Children ages 3-12: $4, Students: $4, Nature Museum members: free. Chicago residents save $1 off of general admission. Tuesdays are free days until May 28, when summer weekdays become free days (M-F, May 28 through July 10).
Hours are Saturday and Sunday: 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Weekdays: 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM. Closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day.
For more information call 773-871-2668, or visit their web site.