Doug Taron is a mild-mannered biochemist Monday through Friday.
Yet this 35-year-old Elgin resident has a reputation among his peers as an accomplished hunter in his off hours.
For on most sunny weekends during warm weather he dons his Cubs hat, smears on mosquito repellent and heads for his favorite haunt, Elgin’s 90-acre Bluff Spring Fen. His weapons? A large butterfly net and a clipboard.
Taron, a self-taught butterfly expert, is one of about 40 butterfly monitors working under the umbrella of the Illinois Nature Conservancy’s Chicago region butterfly monitoring network.
As the project coordinator, Taron is also the backbone of the program, working tirelessly to recruit and train new volunteers, plot census routes, field questions and collect the seasonal barrage of reports from fellow monitors.
“We simply wouldn’t have a program without Doug,” said Laurel Ross, field representative at the Nature Conservancy’s Illinois office in Chicago. “No staff person has the knowledge and time to devote that he has. He puts a tremendous amount of himself into this.”
Winding his way through waist-high cordgrass at Bluff Spring Fen one recent morning, Taron explained that the goal of the project is not only to raise awareness of and appreciation for butterflies, but to discover correlations between the overall health and richness of Nature Conservancy sites and butterfly populations.
In four to five years, Taron said, they will be able answer conservation questions ranging from site-specific management issues such as the effects of prairie burning on populations of Baltimore checkerspot butterflies to the regional ramifications of habitat loss on invertebrate distribution patterns.
“You’ll hear people say insect diversity is a good barometer of the health of a natural area,” he said, stepping carefully over water-filled potholes. “And the reason they’re a good barometer is because they respond to changes more quickly than plants do. . . . The majority of insects absolutely have to go through their entire life cycle every year. You can prevent a plant from setting seed, sometimes many years in a row, and the plant will still hang on. But if a butterfly doesn’t lay eggs that year or a caterpillar doesn’t survive, then it’s gone, you’ve eliminated it.”
Taron said butterflies are a particularly good subject to study because a large percentage of both caterpillars and adult butterflies require specific kinds of plants and habitats and are especially vulnerable to changes in the landscape. Prairie grasslands, wetlands, sand dunes and woodlands are among the most jeopardized butterfly habitats and head the list of Nature Conservancy restoration efforts.
“We’re just now getting enough data over the years to be able to use it-to see some trends,” noted Ross. “We had a hunch that the richer we make the habitat, the better it is for the animals, but we wanted data to know for sure.”
“And people like (butterflies) . . . they capture people’s imagination,” Taron said. “It’s fairly easy to convince people that really beautiful butterflies like the regal fritillary, which are closely associated with prairie and becoming rare, are worth saving.”
Modeled after a similar program that started in England during the late 1960s, the monitoring program was designed for the Nature Conservancy in 1987 by Ron Panzer of Oak Forest, an ardent invertebrate conservationist and a biologist with Northeastern Illinois University.
Starting with just a handful of volunteers monitoring six or seven natural area restoration sites in 1987, Taron, Panzer and Don Stillwaugh, a freelance biologist from Prospect Heights, expanded the program in its early days by traveling throughout the Chicago region giving butterfly walks and conducting identification workshops.
Today the monitoring network has grown to include more than 40 Illinois Nature Conservancy sites and volunteers scattered within a 100-mile radius of Chicago.
“This is the cutting edge of invertebrate conservation biology,” Stillwaugh said with a grin.
And, unlike the program in England, which was conducted by paid professionals, this program was designed to succeed on volunteer effort.
“Data of this magnitude will never be generated by scientists” because of financial considerations, Panzer stressed. “There’s no way they could do it. This data will be unrivaled in North America, and I would go on to say it’s probably the only way we’ll ever be able to monitor invertebrates on a meaningful level on these natural areas-it’s that important.”
Panzer said despite his enthusiasm for the program, “I wasn’t wildly optimistic about it really taking off, because we (Panzer and Stillwaugh) didn’t have the time to drop everything and work with (the new volunteers)-you can’t expect people to teach themselves, and learning the butterflies is not easy.”
He credits the program’s success to Taron’s initiative and continuing dedication.
“If you would have asked me (in 1987) what it would take (to make this take off),” he recalled, “I would have said, `some professional guy, he’s gotta be nice, with a degree in the sciences who’s an absolute expert, knows the butterflies as well as I do and is committed to working to save the environment.’ And then I would have laughed, because the likelihood of finding someone like this was remote.
“Well, that’s what (Doug) is. He’s this incredibly intelligent guy with absolute sound scientific training, and he brings with him a complete knowledge of butterflies. If this was a job and we were going to pay $50,000 a year, we probably would have hired him. I doubt if many candidates could have had those credentials. And again, most important, it might sound hokey, but this is a volunteer thing and you need somebody who’s nice, and likable, and likes other people and doesn’t get upset working with human beings,” he said, laughing. “You know, it’s not always easy.”
Indeed, when Taron, who is single, is not out monitoring Bluff Spring Fen, he can often be found leading butterfly walks in other natural areas, teaching workshops both in the field and in a classroom, giving slide shows or poring over the latest findings of other monitors. (Taron says his interest in butterflies was sparked at age 6 when he received a butterfly net from the Easter Bunny.)
“He has a way of getting people pretty enthused about this,” noted Mel Manner, a new monitor from South Elgin. “I mean, most people like (butterflies), but the way he talks about them . . . you really get an appreciation for their role.”
Manner, who started monitoring a prairie in Burlington Township this past spring, said that because the biggest challenge for new monitors is learning how to identify the butterflies, the training sessions Taron conducts are invaluable.
Topics range from anatomy and classifications to unique diagnostic features, to food and habitat preferences.
With anywhere from 25 to 50 or more species on a site (there are about 100 species found in northern Illinois), Taron said it usually takes most people about a year to feel comfortable identifying butterflies on their routes.
Stopping to point out some fat Baltimore checkerspot caterpillars munching happily on a penstemon plant, Taron explained the actual monitoring involves walking a pre-set census route at least four times between mid-June and the end of July. Butterflies spotted or caught (they’re carefully netted and released) within 20 feet of the path are recorded along with notations about weather and habitat.
Using a database that he designed, Taron will also provide the know-how and computer expertise to analyze the data that, in four or five years, he says will not only help justify the argument for aggressively managing what’s left of the pre-settlement landscape, but also will help in adding species to the state endangered list before it’s too late (two of the species listed are already thought to be extinct).
Currently Taron shares data with the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission, various forest preserves and the governor-appointed Endangered Species Protection Board, which is responsible for listing plants and animals threatened with extinction in Illinois.
According to Susan Lauzon, executive director of the Endangered Species Protection Board, the process for getting a species listed starts with proving that an exhaustive search has been done for the species in question and ends with months of scrutiny, public hearings and administrative paper work.
“(A listing) must be based on scientific evidence,” she said from her Springfield office, and that evidence is interpreted by teams of technical advisors and staff before a recommendation is given to the board.
“I’m not familiar with anything else that’s such a well organized program and that trains volunteers to do this type of job,” she added.
While Taron admits the paperwork and detail minding can at times be a little overwhelming, “That’s all kind of far away when you’re out walking around, and the sun is out, no one else is there, and the butterflies are flying all around you,” he said. “It’s awfully hard to remember the paperwork at that point.
“When I’m out in the field, especially if I’m out by myself doing my census route, it’s surprisingly close to the little kid with the new butterfly net going out to see what he can find.”
For information on becoming a butterfly monitor, write to Taron, at the Illinois Nature Conservancy, 79 W. Monroe St., Suite 900, Chicago, Ill. 60603.
