Peggy Notbaert Museum of Nature

The Peggy Notbaert Museum of Nature collection is based on exhibits collected since 1857 by the Chicago Academy of Sciences. The museum was opened in 1999 with the aim to turn people towards nature, to identify environmental problems and, most importantly, to find ways to solve them.

Today, the museum has more than 70 thousand units of insects, a unique collection of mollusks and snails, samples of 580 species of birds, a large number of amphibians and reptiles. Moreover, many samples belong not only to different years, but also to different centuries, which allows scientists to track the change in the appearance, and often the chemical composition of living organisms and their individual cells.

The visiting card of the museum has since become the so-called Butterfly Harbor - a large pavilion where the conditions of the rainforest are recreated. Hundreds of butterflies flutter over ponds, bright flowers and evergreen shrubs. They are not afraid of people, sit on the outstretched hand, on the head, allow you to admire their beauty up close. And there is something to see: 75 species of these delicate creatures differ in wing shades, size, number of dots, stripes and antennae length. Every week about 1,000 sleeping dolls are brought here to get a new batch of flying gems.