Fast and graceful, hummingbirds flit from flower to flower—but which ones and why? A Chicago Botanic Garden scientist and his collaborators have made some unexpected findings on the subject.

It’s a common perception that plants are perfectly matched to their pollinators and that each pollinator has a specific flower type that they are attracted to. For hummingbirds, many gardeners and scientists alike have long assumed their flower type to be one that is strikingly red, tubular, and scentless.

At the end of fall, it is easy for people to think that nature has shut down for the winter—this could not be farther from the truth.

I am sure that most of you know what I am referring to when I say “leap year.” Although this is not a leap year, I am suggesting that we unofficially call 2015 “Lep Year”—“lep” being short for Lepidoptera (from the Latin “scaly wing”), the order of insects that includes butterflies and moths. It has probably been a decade or more since I have seen the diversity and abundance of butterflies and moths that I have seen this past spring and summer.

While working out in the woods this winter, a small lump on the branch of a young elm tree caught my attention. At first I thought it might be a gall, or an injury that had healed-over. On closer inspection, the lump turned out to be a ruby-throated hummingbird nest from last summer. 

Most people recognize a squirrel nest, called a drey, when they see one. The eastern gray squirrels in our region build dreys in trees for shelter and protection from the elements. What you see as a messy clump of leaves is actually a structure formed from sticks and then lined with leaves and other materials to make it a dry and cozy home.

Many of our scientists and horticulturists work in the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Plant Conservation Science Center. Talking to our scientists, it's easy to hear about the research topics that get them excited. Former senior ecologist Jim Steffen always had lots of good spider stories. 

Work this quiz with every kid you know:

The (female) cross orbweaver spider, named for the cross on the top of her abdomen.

While checking the perimeter fence around McDonald Woods to see if there was any damage to the fence after a windy day, I discovered a large red oak that had lost its foothold in the frozen soil and had toppled over against a white oak. Since the tree was threatening to push the other oak over into the fence, I decided to cut the red oak down to save the white oak and the fence.

The elegant flight and bright white plumage of the great egret (Ardea alba) belie its harsh croak when it takes off from a marsh. It was this bird’s beauty that nearly led to its demise at the turn of the twentieth century, when these and other waders were hunted for their feathery plumes that women wore in their hats.

Since then, the great egret, standing more than 3 feet tall with a nearly 5-foot wing span, has become the symbol for the National Audubon Society, founded in part to stop these birds from being killed to extinction.

Chick-a-dee-dee-dee.

Most people recognize that familiar call of the black-capped chickadee. It’s often heard in late summer and fall as chickadees gather in family groups and small feeding flocks to prepare for the winter.

The chickadee’s song—translated as “Hey, sweetie,” (though you can’t often hear the third syllable)—is reserved for late winter, spring, and summer, when the bird is courting and nesting. Nothing brightens a mid-February day more than when a chickadee sings because to those who hear it, the song signals spring’s arrival.

A lot of birds migrate through the area this time of year, but I have to say warblers are my favorites. The other day, when the rain cleared and the sun came out, I found myself in warbler heaven!

Yellow-rumped warblers (Setophaga coronata) are some of the most common warblers to be seen at the Garden. You can spot them almost anywhere! Photo © Carol Freeman

There is a Native American myth that is believed to have originated with the Onondaga tribe of the Iroquois nation of northeastern North America. It is a creation legend about how the earth (the land) was created. The legend incorporates a number of different animals including swans, pied-billed grebes, muskrats, and many others. The central character in the story is a turtle. The turtle, an island in a world of water, was chosen to carry soil and tree seedlings on its back, which eventually became the land the people lived on. So this story is about preservation and nurturing.

As winter grays and whites fold over the outside world, a splash of gold, red, or blue can provide a joyful relief. Spy a bird, or two, or three here at the Garden using prime spots recommended by Jim Steffen, Garden senior ecologist and manager of the McDonald Woods.

Look up! In partnership with Friends of the Chicago River (FOCR) and the Forest Preserves of Cook County (FPCC), an osprey nesting platform was installed along the North Branch Trail at the south end of the Chicago Botanic Garden near Dundee Road.

Butterflies & Blooms at the Chicago Botanic Garden has hosted some remarkable butterfly species. One definite crowd-pleaser: the orange dead leaf (Kallima inachus). 

If we didn’t point out this character to guests, no one would ever suspect that they were looking at a butterfly.

Fellow Lepidoptera enthusiasts, the Chicago Botanic Garden's Butterflies & Blooms exhibition features a huge variety of live butterflies. One interesting example is Caligo atreus, also known as the yellow-edged owl, or our favorite: the magnificent owl. 

When a coyote pirouettes in the snow, you start to wonder. Where was it going? And what made it turn?

After a big snow, I love looking for wildlife tracks and the stories they tell. The paw prints and other tracks in the snow are among the small wonders of winter.

Butterflies are beautiful, magical, and mysterious creatures.

Sara Longwing
©Carol Freeman

The flowers are gone, the trees are bare, now what to photograph? Birds, of course! Winter is a great time to get some fabulous shots of winter birds. One huge bonus is that there are no leaves on the trees and the birds are much easier to see!

One of our favorite insects at the Chicago Botanic Garden is the praying mantis. So we were very excited to obtain an egg case earlier this spring. We decided to keep it indoors so we could watch it hatch, and then release the newly hatched insects into the Garden.

A few years ago, in early spring, I was traveling through the McDonald Woods at the Chicago Botanic Garden, searching for some of the flat-bodied crab spiders (Philodromus) that typically spend the winter in communal groupings under the loose bark of dead trees. Upon reaching a small stand of dead American elm trees, I began to lift the loose remaining bark away from one of the trees to see if any spiders were present.

As the days get shorter, you might be looking for off-the-beaten paths where you can soak up the rest of the season. I’ve got just the place for you—the Barbara Brown Nature Reserve.

When you walk along the natural areas of the Chicago Botanic Garden, you’ll notice hundreds of species of plants. But if you take a closer look, you’ll notice signs of wildlife all around you, too. Their connection makes for the best kind of codependency.

In August, when the jewelweed and cardinal flowers bloom, the ruby-throated hummingbird is migrating. It’s perfect timing, because the hummingbirds get energy for their journey southward by sipping nectar from the blossoms of these plants native to northern Illinois.

Ruby-throated hummingbird © Carol Freeman

We humans have used technology to become masters of communication. But we are far from the only species with an impressive array of “superhuman” abilities. Butterflies have unique features they use for socializing, mating, warding off predators, and more!

Scarlet Mormon (Papilio rumanzovia)
Photo by Bill Bishoff

In early May, when the leaves of maples are unfolding into a soft green, the Baltimore oriole (Icterus galbula) returns, giving his liquid “tea-dear-dear” song in suburban yards and forest preserve edges.

Homeowners who put oranges and grape jelly in feeders are often rewarded with a look at the male with his black head and back contrasting with his brilliant orange breast as he eats a spring meal.

Several decades ago, an osprey would be a rare—if not impossible—sight in Cook County in the summer. But now, thanks to the ban on certain pesticides (including DDT), and the creation of osprey nesting platforms, the fish-eating bird is breeding again in local forest preserves.

With more than 1,850 known species of moths in the state of Illinois—more than ten times the diversity of butterflies—it is a real adventure sampling the moth species inhabiting the McDonald Woods at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Using a combination of light and bait traps along with visual searches, I have been investigating the diversity of moth species found in the restored portions of our oak woodland. Moths are removed from the traps and then photographed before being released back to the woodland.

Most butterflies and moths featured in popular magazines and other media are large, well-known species, such as monarchs and luna moths.

Within scientific communities as well, species descriptions are biased toward larger moths, overlooking the multitude of tiny ones. Despite this tendency to favor larger species, the average moth is actually quite small, though far from nondescript!

Mompha species moth; photo taken in Utah

To most people, the word “pollinator” is synonymous with the word “bee,” but only a fraction of plants are pollinated by bees.

In fact, many different insects and mammals are pollinators—bats, birds, beetles, moths, and more. As part of National Moth Week, we wanted to highlight our work on a very special group of moths: the Sphingidae, or hawkmoths, which pollinate more than 106 plant species in North America alone, and many more around the world.

On a typical day in the Butterflies & Blooms exhibition, you will see our butterflies flying, sunning themselves, or resting in the foliage.

If you happen to come to the exhibition just after a rain shower, and the sun is shining, it’s your lucky day, because love is literally in the air.

Thanksgiving is here again, and we at the Chicago Botanic Garden are thankful for all the pollinators who make our food possible, every day, around the world. Bats, bees, butterflies, birds, and more pollinate plants that create one-third of the food we eat.

As you enjoy a meal with friends and family, take a moment to say thanks for the little things that make such a big difference—pollinators!

This season, the Chicago Botanic Garden honors pollinators through Bees & Beyond, a program that reveals the vital role pollinators play in our everyday lives and in a healthy, diverse planet. The “beyond” in the title refers to bats, birds, butterflies, moths, wind, and generally any force or creature that keeps our world producing.

When I was growing up, there were certain animals I was saddened to think I would never see in my lifetime. There were those species that had become extinct, of course, like passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, ivory-billed woodpeckers, and Labrador ducks. I had read the life histories of these species and marveled at descriptions of their colors, sounds, and abundance. It made me feel depressed that these amazing creatures were gone forever.

Read on.

Want to see a butterfly dry its wings, hang upside down, or even fight? Watch the weather first. As summer gets underway, it’s fun to see how weather changes affect the activity at Butterfly & Blooms. The seasonal exhibition is a photographer’s dream, with hundreds of live butterfly species native to countries around the world. Here are some tips on butterfly behavior, depending on the weather:

Winter is a great time to celebrate the beauty of the natural world and wildlife around you.

May is  the month to look for warblers, vireos, thrushes, sparrows, and some shorebirds, as they migrate through the Chicago area.

Most birders might agree that the highlight this time of year is warblers. It is for me—they are tiny jewels with wings. I feel totally blessed if I can see a few during migration.

To feed, or not to feed, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of empty bird feeders,
Or to take arms against a sea of winter cold
And by opposing it, feed them.

At the Chicago Botanic Garden's Butterflies & Blooms exhibition, I receive a wide variety of questions about butterfly physiology. My favorite questions are ones that don’t have a substantiated answer, only theories posited by lepidopterists (or those who study butterflies and moths). I always enjoy these questions, since they are on the cutting edge of scientific understanding.

One such question is: “What are those specs of gold on the monarch butterflies?” The short answer is “Nobody knows!” But there are a few interesting theories.

If you happened to walk around the Heritage Garden in late June, the unusual blue color of the Moroccan mountain eryngo (pronounced eh-RING-go), Eryngium variifolium, probably caught your eye, and its peculiar perfume tickled your nose. It was also swarming with flying insects.

One day at Butterflies & Blooms, I noticed a crepuscular, cosmopolitan imago puddling in order to prepare for an upcoming lek. What did I just say?

The vocabulary surrounding Lepidoptera can be very specific—and not so easy to understand. Let’s break it down, and go over some of my favorite butterfly and moth terminology (and learn some of the amazing things these insects do). Then, see if you can decode the sentence above.

A Half Male, Half Female Butterfly

At Butterflies & Blooms on Monday, I saw something I had never seen before in my five years as a butterfly wrangler at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I noticed that a leopard lacewing's right wings were bright orange, just like any other male of the species, but the left wings were beige—only females have beige wings. This lacewing was half male and half female, or a gynandromorphic butterfly.

It still counts as summer as long as there are dragonflies around. Some years at the Chicago Botanic Garden, there are dragonflies everywhere! The quick, strong fliers seem to love the Garden.

Eastern pondhawk dragonfly, female. Most dragonflies have very different-looking males and females. This one was in the Native Plant Garden. Photo ©Carol Freeman.

Several years ago, while walking the nature trail in McDonald Woods, I stopped, having heard a high-pitched squeaking emanating from the sedges and grasses along side the trail. (This was when my hearing was still acute enough to detect such high-frequency sounds.) It took me a while, but based on the emphatic commotion, I finally realized I was hearing either a romantic interlude or territorial dispute between two of the smallest carnivorous mammals in our woodland: shrews.

In the middle of the night, an 8-inch bundle of feathers and hollow bones projects a haunting, mysterious sound. It sounds like the rising and falling whinny of a horse, followed by a piercing tremolo. Though it sounds far away, the bird—an eastern screech-owl—could likely be right above your head (that is, if you are out in the middle of the woods at night).

They’re all over the Learning Center and maybe around your house, too. They are boxelder bugs, and although they are a nuisance, they are harmless.

So while they are bugging us, let’s find some things to admire about them.

First let’s answer the question: Why are they all here right now?

A longtime favorite of staff and visitors alike, the zebra longwing (Heliconius charitonius) is native from South America to south Texas and Florida, and occasionally an immigrant can be found as far north as Nebraska! The zebra longwing is the state butterfly of Florida.