Not all of the butterflies in the breeding program at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum are endangered. The Gorgone Checkerspot isn’t considered endangered, yet it has only a few populations in the Chicago region.

Vincent Olivares, 31-year-old butterfly conservator at the Notebaert, protects endangered butterfly populations in Illinois through breeding programs and opens people’s eyes to the importance of some of earth’s tiniest creatures - insects.

The door Butterfly Haven opens to the humid home of a mock jungle surrounds visitors — complete with paths, a waterfall, simulated sky and, of course, butterflies. Some hang from flower clusters or sip nectar from fruit assembled in bowls, while dozens of others flutter carelessly around you. The amazing wonder of it all can enchant the crankiest curmudgeon.

The haven houses a total of about 1,000 adult butterflies, representing between 35 to 45 different species. In the lab, Olivares is studying the life cycle of five to seven species with a total of 500 individual caterpillars and adult butterflies.The Butterfly Haven provides a sanctuary where people also can learn about other insects, such as moths.

Butterflies act as a “liaison to the insect world,” said Olivares, director of anthropod conservation at the Notebaert. “Butterflies help to break that gap between the creepy crawly things and the really cool beautiful things,” he said.

Words and gestures convey Olivares’ passion for enhancing human interest and understanding about insect conservation. His work doesn’t just deal with the tropical butterflies that you see in the Butterfly Haven. He also works to repopulate communities of butterflies in Illinois.

In an effort to reintroduce rare and endangered butterflies back to our local area, Olivares is learning how the life cycle of these butterflies works. Once he discovers the intricacies of each species, he can then bring them back to their respective habitat.

In this lab we are raising butterflies that are either endangered or in peril, which just means rare or they only have small populations in the state of Illinois. We work with usually several different types of butterflies throughout the year. Right now we have got Regal Fritillaries that were brought in as adult females at the end of last year. We got them to lay their eggs in the lab and then we over-wintered the larva, which is like a hibernation, so the larva hibernate here. Then we wake them up in the spring and continue their life cycle. They spend their entire winter as a tiny little two or three millimeter caterpillar. Then we wake them up in the spring and continue rearing them here until we have adults. And then we can take one butterfly or two butterflies that may lay 1,000 eggs each and we can take just a couple of rare butterflies and end up with a ton of rare butterflies. In this case we had about 110 butterflies - adults. We released most of them. So these are adults that we raised. We already released one hundred and these are just the last few stragglers that have just been emerging the last week or so and we will release these later this week at the same prairie.

There are enough. We work with the Regal Fritillary. The only population that is in Illinois has introduced a couple of years ago. The other butterflies that are over there in that cage are called Gorgone Checkerspots. Those butterflies are not endangered but they have just a few populations in the Chicago region. This is a second generation from those butterflies and so far in the second generation we have about 30 adults and we expect another 70 to 100 adults to be emerging in the next few days and we will go out this weekend or the end of next weekend and release more butterflies to add to that population we just introduced. We only reintroduce butterflies at places where they once lived and have been wiped out.

We work closely with land managers, conservation scientists, biologists, land stewards – people that take care of these properties and we work carefully with them to make sure that everything these butterflies need is in place. You know you think “butterflies” – well all they need is flowers to drink nectar, but every butterfly has a specific plant it lays it’s eggs on and the abundance of that plant proves to be really important too. And that is called their host plant. The host plant is the plant the butterfly lays its eggs on.

If we took an acre and we planted all the right plants and we made sure we had lots of nectar for these butterflies and released the Gorgone Checkerspots they probably wouldn’t make it. Even though an acre seems pretty large for butterfly that is only about the size of a quarter. It is still not enough to sustain a population. Butterflies need lots of room. They need lots of high quality native land. Unfortunately in Chicago we only have less than 1/10th of one percent of that native land because of encroachment because we have built buildings and mini malls and all these other little things that we have kind of encroached on these lands on.

We release at some of the Indian boundary prairies in Markham, Ill., and most of those prairies are a few hundred acres, so they are just big enough. And we work with the land stewards there for a long time to make sure that the host plant is abundant. And we have seen these butterflies showing up after we released them, so we know that they are taking to the land, but if you stand in the middle of these prairies and you look in all directions you see houses on one side, you see big box stores on another side and you see highways on the other sides. So these are really small areas and they are just big enough to support these butterflies.

Yes, they are sensitive to everything. Butterflies are actually indicators of high quality prairies. If you go to a park district park you see lots of native flowers. You may see three or four types of butterflies, but if you go to a really good prairie and you see lots of flowers you may see a couple dozen different types of butterflies. And when you see lots of butterflies, you know that it is high quality prairie or high quality restoration or high quality native land. But butterflies are just as sensitive to everything else. We spray all sorts of things and some of those things, it is thought, have had some effect on butterflies. A lot of people I have talked to about butterflies in general — people in their 40s and 50s — say, “Oh when I was a kid there were butterflies everywhere, but now I don’t see butterflies.” Well it is a couple different things — one of them is that you are just not looking in the right places, but if you think about all the chemicals that we use regularly for mosquitoes and pesticides for other animals and things we use on farms those chemicals have a negative impact at some point on all other animals and sometimes even people and we know that already. If a beautiful native prairie is right next to a farm, then easily that run off could affect the prairie or the pesticides could affect a prairie or the animals or insects living on a prairie.

Now, people raise butterflies – lots of people raise butterflies for classrooms and lots of people raise butterflies for exhibits like the one that is upstairs. But raising butterflies for exhibit purposes is different from raising butterflies for conservation purposes. When you raise butterflies for exhibits you just want a bunch of butterflies that you can sell and you can put into a room and let them flutter around and people see them and they look great and people get really interested and excited.

When you raise butterflies for conservation programs, you have to make sure that you get the best quality butterfly that you can and so that means you need to pay special care to how you handle this butterfly. When we get a female butterfly, we take them in. We bring them here. We set them up in a container until they lay eggs. Every morning we take them out and we hand feed the butterfly to make sure that she has got all the nutrients she needs to lay eggs. We water them all day. Once those eggs hatch we want to make sure that those eggs are healthy and stay disease free. We physically remove the eggs from the plants, put them in Petri dishes, keep them in a clean environment. We actually wash the eggs if we have to. Once the larva hatch each larva gets put in separate containers, like the ones you see right here.

We have to do all kinds of things. Not only do we feed them every day, we have to make sure that the humidity stays a good level in this room. We have to handle these caterpillars with care. We have to handle their chrysalis with care. When they emerge, instead of just hanging the chrysalis right on top of there, we actually put a piece of screen in there so if they do fall they can crawl up on something. We go in there and physically move butterflies around and put them where they need to be so they can dry properly. We end up having to do a lot of different things that if you are raising butterflies for an exhibit you just don’t do because you know you cut your losses. In this case we can’t cut our losses. Some of these butterflies that we work with most people will never see, even if they really love butterflies because they are just really, really rare.

Another butterfly that we work with is a Swamp Metalmark. Let me grab it. This is a rare — very rare — butterfly and this butterfly probably was always rare because it lives in a place that is kind of unusual. It lives in a fen, which is a type of wetland. Before people moved in, there were fens everywhere, but a lot of wetlands were drained when people decided to start building neighborhoods and communities and so we lost a lot of these wetlands. This butterfly is now more rare than ever. The last sighting of this butterfly in Illinois was in the 1980’s. And we don’t even know if that was real…we haven’t been able to find the evidence that it was actually confirmed. To get breeding stock for this butterfly we have to go to Wisconsin and we can take two or three females of this butterfly. While a lot of butterflies lay a lot of eggs - some butterflies will lay 300 eggs maybe up to 1,000. This butterfly, when we get a good number of eggs, it is about 75 or 80 - so it is not many. And from that 75 or 80 eggs, from two or three moms, we want to make a few hundred butterflies.

And so we have had limited success with this butterfly so far. We have been working with it for a few years now. The one thing that we have been able to do has only been done a couple of times before is to get it all the way through its entire life cycle. It is a very picky little butterfly. But if we can bring this butterfly back then we can bring any butterfly back so we have been working on it for quite a while.