“It’s a wood nymph.” Doug Taron’s voice sounds tight, urgent. “Gary, can you catch it?”
But Gary doesn’t need us. “Got it!” he hollers. We run toward him. I’m a novice here, but even I know that Gary’s hostage won’t turn out to be a nubile Lolita. We gather close to examine his catch through the web of the butterfly net. The wood nymph’s wings have the brown color and dusty texture of a dirt road, yet it has the elegance all butterflies seem to possess. Taron explains to us that the darkness of its wings distinguishes it from the wood satyr; the nymph appears almost black in flight. The field guides we check indicate an orange spot on its upper wing, but Taron says the species rarely displays such a patch in Illinois.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I know my local wildflowers, grasses, trees, birds, mammals, and some insects reasonably well, but I don’t know butterflies at all. Butterflies are harder to learn than birds or plants. They rarely sit still long enough to be identified, and their key features are impossible to see as they flutter in the distance. People do come to know them well enough to identify them on the fly, but the only way to reach that point is to capture them, hold them for a while, and examine them carefully many times.
But in the end, what difference does it make? Lord knows I’m not competing to be the coolest person to walk the streets of Wicker Park, so a month ago I sent off for the kind of catcher Taron recommends, a white 15-inch aerial net from BioQuip in California.
Near the end of the day, since we really are quite lost, we head for the power lines, the one landscape feature we can be sure about. High-tension wires coming from the Braidwood nuclear reactor are plainly visible above the branches of the black oaks. When we emerge from the preserve, we find ourselves on private land used for a horse stable.
“I haven’t seen them this year either,” Horn adds.
I call Doug Taron to ask how likely it is that the regal fritillaries were killed off when the stable went in. “I can’t conclude anything from a rigorous scientific standpoint from our one-day snapshot,” he says. “But I looked at my notes and found that when I went to Braidwood and saw all the regal fritillaries in ’86 I was there on July 13. Our workshop was the 16th. We were definitely in the window of when the regal fritillaries should have been flying.”
