A Quirk of Nature

Since it opened in Lincoln Park eight years ago, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum has struggled to raise money, draw crowds, and make itself known as more than the site of a stunning butterfly haven. Will it find its own way--or merge with the nearby zoo?

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TIGER LONGWING More than 75 species of butterflies take flight in the museum's junglelike 2,700-square-foot haven.

AIRBORNE Butterflies-both Midwestern and tropical-are released at the Nature Museum twice a day.

SCIENCE DIGEST The challenge for the museum is to distinguish itself, to make it clear to people why it exists.

In the hothouse heat, the butterflies swarm everywhere. Painted ladies-all mottled brown, red, and orange-flit above the heads of flowers. Mon-archs descend on feeding-station platforms for the sliced oranges. Luna moths, as big as salad plates, float by. And dancing overhead, toward the vaulted glass ceiling, are swallowtails, checkered whites, and variegated fritillaries.

This is one of two daily butterfly releases, showcasing the first flights of dozens of butterflies-both Midwestern and tropical-in the Judy Istock Butterfly Haven at the Nature Museum. (Istock is a board member of the museum; her husband, Verne, is a former president and chief executive officer of First Chicago.) The 2,700-square-foot haven is breathtakingly lush: purple-and-orange birds from South America and Australia perch in the shrubs; trees arch over the winding paths, and the sound of the waterfall, whose artificial rocks were cast from real ones in Cook County's Sagawau Canyon, helps mask the shrieks of excited schoolchildren.

"I would call us a hidden gem," says Laurene von Klan, 48, the chief executive officer of the museum since 2005. "A lot of people don't know we're here, and they don't know the quality of the experience we can offer." A native New Yorker, von Klan moved to Chicago 26 years ago to complete her master's degree in international relations at the University of Chicago. Before moving to the Nature Museum, she was the executive director of the nonprofit organization Friends of the Chicago River. In her office, with its sweeping views of the museum's prairie plantings and nature trails, von Klan projects confidence in changing the perception of the Notebaert. Revenue from admissions in 2002, during the heyday of the Grossology exhibit, reached $500,000 compared with $230,000 today. The 1998 prospectus for the museum projected an annual attendance of more than 250,000; last year the museum drew 197,000. (By comparison, the neighboring Lincoln Park Zoo has three million visitors annually, the nearby conservatory has 300,000, and a niche-based institution like the National Museum of Mexican Art, which opened 20 years ago in Pilsen, welcomes 150,000 visitors a year.)

"Even before this museum opened, there were challenges," von Klan says. "First, when the prospectus was written, it was assumed that a 400-car parking lot was going to be built." But Lincoln Park is mainly landfill, so any plans to dig a lower-level parking lot had to be scrapped early on-diggers would have quickly reached Lake Michigan. Also, von Klan points out, admission to her neighbors, the zoo and the conservatory, is free, while the museum charges seven dollars for adults and four for children.

"From the beginning, this has been a concept that was underthought," says one former board member. "From exactly who it was going to serve and how it was going to operate, where the school kids who were visiting would eat their lunches-everything was a bit of an afterthought."

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The Chicago Academy of Sciences grew out of the passion for nature of a vigorous early Chicagoan. Born in 1835, in New Orleans, Robert Kennicott was a year old when his family moved to South Northfield Township (now Glenview). Through a land grant, they took possession of about 150 acres of land along Milwaukee Avenue and built a massive Gothic-style house. Kennicott's father, the first doctor in the area, pursued his interest in horticulture by starting the Grove Nursery.

Robert Kennicott received little formal education; he was allowed to roam the property, recording and studying the plants and animals. He developed a reputation for clear descriptions and accurate observations of nature. In 1857, he founded the Chicago Academy of Sciences as a base for his collection of natural history specimens. The emphasis was on creating a center for scientific study.

Two years later, Kennicott took off on a three-year expedition, jointly sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and the Hudson's Bay Company, to northern Canada and Alaska. He traveled thousands of miles on foot and by dogsled, sending more than 1,700 specimens back to the Smithsonian. Upon returning, he settled briefly at the Smithsonian as a cataloger, then returned to Chicago in 1865 to become the curator of the Chicago Academy of Sciences.

Originally the academy was housed in a new building at Wabash Avenue and Van Buren Street. Its natural history collection, bolstered by loans from the Smithsonian, quickly became one of the finest in the Midwest. But by the end of 1865, Kennicott was eager to go back to exploring. "It's all very well to talk of the delights of the civilized world," he wrote, "but give me the comfortable North where a man can have some fun, see good days, and smoke his pipe unmolested."

This time Kennicott, as the lead scientist for an expedition sponsored by Western Union, traveled north through Alaska in search of a way to bring telegraph lines from Russia to North America. The trip was excessively difficult. Eventually, Kennicott found himself stranded in the lower Yukon with two companions. In May 1866, Kennicott died in the field. Some reports say he suffered a heart attack; others claim he committed suicide.

In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed the academy's building and its holdings. A small owl, sent back by Kennicott's last Alaska expedition, proved to be a new species. It was named the Western screech-owl, and formally known as Otus kennicottii.

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