Hyde Park Bugs

Words and Pictures By Michael LaBarbera

IT WAS A SUMMER PROJECT begun on a whim, an excuse for leisurely strolls around the neighborhood. How many bugs could I photograph in Hyde Park, the community that surrounds the University of Chicago on the South Side of the city? To make matters more interesting, I decided to restrict my attention to the residential rectangle bordered by 56th Street on the north and 58th on the south; east and west boundaries were Stony Island and Ellis Avenues, respectively. In this rectangle, any arthropod — insects, spiders, and millipedes — was fair game, but I decided to make the quest more challenging by limiting myself to bugs in plain sight; no turning over rocks, no lifting boards, no digging in flower beds.

“The richness of nature is not something we usually think of in the context of cities, but little pieces of wilderness surround us, waiting to be seen.”

Although I had lived in Hyde Park for 26 years, that summer was the first time I really saw it. My walks into work in the morning and home in the evening took twice as long as usual. I looked at every tree and flower, wandered alleys I'd barely noticed before, discovered pocket gardens and patches of prairie flowers, and scoured the unkempt wild of the Illinois Central right-of-way. Each new image was a new challenge in identification.

By the end of the summer, I'd photographed 124 species of arthropod (and identified about three quarters of them), and had at least double that number of moments when I was stopped in my tracks by the breathtaking beauty that I had walked by, unseeing, for two dozen years.

The richness of nature is not something we usually think of in the context of cities, but little pieces of wilderness surround us, waiting to be seen. I know I recorded only a small fraction of the arthropods in my neighborhood — the nocturnal, the subterranean, and the shy all escaped my notice, and I deliberately avoided the large parks and the lakefront as being too easy a mark. As the summer wore on, some species grew, mated, laid their eggs and disappeared, while others swept through my neighborhood in a week from first appearance to last lonely straggler. Fresh delights appeared literally every day.

Get down on your hands and knees and poke your nose into a patch of weeds. Some might argue that the word “aesthetics” and the word “bug” shouldn’t be in the same sentence, but if you can get over your prejudices that the proper number of legs is less than or equal to four and that eyes need to have a pupil, you'll find much to admire here. You might just find a moment of transcendent beauty, ambling along on six legs.

Michael LaBarbera is a professor in the department of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago and a long-time resident of Hyde Park. He continues to prowl his community, camera in hand, to capture the wilder patches of Chicago.

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Gems of the Bug World, CW, Summer 1998

Little Bugs on the Prairie, CW, Summer 2001