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.
