Nature walk this Saturday at 6:30 — Meet at east door of Museum of Science and Industry!

All photos have been taken in Hyde Park (Chicago) during the past few weeks.

Time to get out and see all these flowering plants before the goldenrods and asters take over!    Nature walk is Saturday evening at 6:30.  We meet at the east door of the Museum of Science and Industry.

Beaver spotted swimming off music bridge (bridge on north side of bobolink meadow -look away from the boat harbor)

rattlesnake master

moon rise on our last moon watch

photo darkened so you can easily see the rabbit in the moon.

Lots of green darner dragonflies were at the blue moon watch

silver-spotted skipper

question mark butterfly on butterfly bush

giant robber fly

Can you find the green caterpillar in this photo?

tall bellflower

fire pink (oops, this is royal catchfly!, thanks aaron!) 

We”ll sort out all the yellow look-alikes on the walk! Is this a black-eyed susan, a coneflower, a cup plant, a sunflower or something else?

another yellow flower to sort out

a primrose family member

swamp milkweed

jewelweed or spotted touch-me-not

A new local! A deer, who has been spotted with 2 fawns

cormorants enjoying the turtle habitat

black-capped chickadee

juvenile spotted sandpipers

monarch on butterfly bush

crabapple with cedar apple rust

elderberry berries

Summer wildlife in Hyde Park (Chicago)

All photos and videos taken in the Hyde Park (Chicago) area during the last month.  Join us for a nature walk this Tuesday at 6 pm.  Meet at the east door of the Museum of Science and Industry.

Nesting killdeer, see video below of killdeer defending her nest by pretending to have 2 broken wings. She lures a potential predator away from the nest by making the predator thinks she will be an easy catch. Once she is away from her nest, she flies away

belted kingfisher

nesting Canada goose

young Canada goose goslings

Young goslings with their parents

Eight teen-aged goslings at the inner harbor!

mourning dove

red-winged blackbird

red-earred slider turtle

anemone at 47th Street Prairie (47th and Cornell)

cedar waxwing at 63rd Street Beach

First set of this year’s mallard ducklings

Very happy to see the draining of the lagoon didn’t decimate our bullfrog population! This one found at south end of bobolink meadow path near the golf driving range

Turtles using the new turtle habitat and so is a beaver! How wonderful it would be if we could protect this key stone species in the Paul Douglas Nature Sanctuary on Wooded Isle. Perhaps in addition to protecting our trees from the beaver’s teeth by wrapping them with wire, some local tree care companies could bring in some recently cut trees for our beavers to use.

A beaver in Hyde Park!

Easiest to see beavers at dawn and dusk. We’ll look for them on the nature walk Tuesday.

carp spawning

mallard duck moulting

green heron. See next photo to see how big she is compared to a great blue heron.

Compare the size of this great blue heron to the green heron. Notice this is a different green heron than the one in the previous photo because it has the bright red legs of a breeding bird

Caterpillar of black swallowtail butterfly

female cardinal

One of our winter ducks, a male hooded merganser, stayed behind this summer and is now molting.

Here is the hooded merganser next to a mallard duck so you can see the size difference

We had some interesting shorebird stop by during migration this spring because the lagoons were drained, including this red phalarope

And finally, a mockingbird has been singing from the top of a tree at 63rd and Lake Shore Drive.  In this video, I can hear the mockingbird mimicking a cardinal, a robin and a phoebe.