Last summer Peggy Macnamara was walking down an Evanston sidewalk when she spotted a fiery searcher. A beetle common in Illinois, the fiery searcher is easy to identify because its iridescent shell changes color as it moves. Before she knew it, she’d taken off her hiking boot and coaxed the insect into it. Then she fished a used cup out of a nearby trash can and transferred her catch into that. “People were looking at me, but I got him home,” she says. “Now I’ve got him in my collection.”
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Macnamara isn’t an entomologist–she teaches scientific illustration at the School of the Art Institute. But she spends a lot of her time on the third floor of the Field Museum, in the insect division of the department of zoology. “That’s where everything good is,” she says. There, pinned to cards and carefully filed away in drawers, are more than 20 million specimens of bugs from all over the world.
Now, with help from the Field’s entomologists, she groups her bugs more scientifically. Sometimes she pesters staff members to pull their favorite specimens or asks them for feedback. “When the legs dry, they get funny,” she says. “I have to have someone telling me if the legs are right.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jon Randolph; illustrations/Peggy Macnamara.
