Year List - 2020 - March 8 edition

Going to try the year list again this year...


March 8, 2020
Location: Bill Jarvis Bird Sanctuary and surrounding parkland.

The lighting was seriously not in my favor, but this appears to be a Red-Headed Merganser.










Common Goldeneye (female)

 
     Dark-Eyed Junco

















 American Tree Sparrow
(right - female; left - male)

Northern
Cardinal
(left - male)

(right - female)

 White-Throated Sparrow
(White-capped variation)

White-throated Sparrow (Tan-capped variation)

Downy Woodpecker  (Eastern, female)

American Robin

The Magic Hedge, Post 1/2 - April 6, 2012

So April 6th was my first trip to the Magic Hedge for the season.  Not a whole lot there yet, and nothing *terribly* exciting, but a few new things and some nice signs of spring.

There was one thing that has me wondering what the season will be like at the Hedge.  They did a massive slash and burn.  I *do* know that burns are part of keeping a wild habitat vibrant and sustainable.  But the vast majority of the area is prairie savannah and all of the tall grasses and flowers have been taken down.  All that's there now is about a month's growth of ground cover plants.  Which means there's no real good places to look for caterpillars or butterflies.  All the birds have taken to the very high trees.

Now, maybe it'll be better in a month or so when some of the prairie grasses have a chance to recover, but right now, there's a whole lot of nothing out there.  Well, not *nothing*... but not a whole lot yet, either.

This is a House Finch.  I'm not sure if I've not seen these before or if I was calling them female Northern Cardinals.  Either way, they're new!  Yay.

House Finch (2012 - 016)

Another House Finch.  Just a different view.  Hopefully the next time I see them, I'll get clearer shots, but these guys *are* skittish.

Brown Creeper (2012 - 017)

A creeper!  My first one for the season.  There will be another one in the North Pond shots that will go up next, but here was the first.

The finch and the creeper are both birds that migrate through Chicago, so it was good to see signs of the migration season starting.  It's a few weeks early, but with the very bizarre weather we had this winter and early spring, this is not surprising.  I just hope we don't get socked with a surprise really bad cold snap that would be very bad for warm-climate birds.

Yellow-Shafted Northern Flicker (2012 - 018)

The flickers have come back in.  This particular flicker is a male Yellow-Shafted Northern Flicker.  His most distinguishing feature (in terms of telling him apart from other forms of flickers) is the black patches on his cheeks.

Now, I know I saw a small flock of them on the ground at Lincoln Park last year, but apparently they never made it to the blog.  I got some great shots of what looked like courting behaviors, but now when I go to look for them, I don't see them here, so I guess I never posted them.  So the good news is, it counts as a newly-blogged species. :)

It was a bit gray and cloudy when I was shooting, so my camera was jumping up to 800 ISO when on automatic settings.  Which is too bad, because this would have been a pretty good shot if it were less grainy.

Northern Cardinal.  They stay all year, and they're fairly common, but I still love seeing them.

Song Sparrow (2012 - 019)

This guy is a Song Sparrow.  Less common than the House Sparrows that we get by the millions (or so it seems).  It was awfully nice of him to turn and look at me while I was shooting him. :)

Eastern Cottontail Rabbit (2012 - 020)

One of the effects of the burn is that the bunnies have all relocated.  They used to hang out in the grasses, but now they're chased into the more forest-y areas.  It makes them a bit harder to see, because at least when they were living in the grasses, they'd come out onto the paths to run and play with each other.





Just one more post for this shoot. Like I said, it was pretty slow and the savannah was gone.  So I'll keep going back to see how the habitat responds, but it could be a slow year at the Hedge. ;)

Just a few last things from Tennessee - Post 4

These are the odds and ends pictures for Bledsoe Creek (which, by the way, I never did see a creek there.  There was a lake... no creek.)

 The Tiger Swallowtail and the Pipevine from the first post were actually hanging out together when we were shooting them.  That was one of the major reasons I thought the pipevine was a black morph tiger.  Just look at the accent color schemes on both - the same blue and orange dots.

American Funnel Web Spider (2012 - 014)

 Wow, I think I was actually able to research the name of a spider.  It's harder than you think.  There are a truly stupid number of different spiders out there.  Also, I kind of gave myself the heebie-jeebies while doing it because of the pictures of Black Widow spiders on the same page.  Being from Illinois, especially northern Illinois, I forget that there's a lot of really, really dangerous wildlife in warmer parts of the country.  We don't have poisonous snakes or spiders to speak of up here.  So anyway, this is an American Funnel Web Spider.

Here she is in her entrance, the stripes on her legs a little easier to see.

And here is her funnel web.  Which, honestly is what made her so easy to identify.  Apparently there's only one particular funnel-web in Tennessee. :)





 

Northern Cardinal (2012 - 015)

 While going through my older posts for the comprehensive lists I realized I'm ignoring things I find commonplace.  Mallard ducks, robins, red-winged blackbirds...  And cardinals.  Like the Blue Jay, I want to get a really good cardinal picture some day.  This is about as bright as Illinois constant-dwellers get.  This one was seen in Tennessee, but we do get them up north and I need to stop ignoring them just because *I* see them all the time doesn't mean everyone else does.

And as a closing note... Cyprus tree nodules.  These projections are coming up off the Cyprus tree roots.  There's something very "medieval people go to Stonehenge" looking about these odd bits of tree root.




So that was my nature-seeking in Tennessee.  Chicago's starting to warm up now so I'm getting some baseline shots.  What animals are here now, in April, so that as the migrations start in the next couple weeks, I can track the timing of various species coming and going.

The Magic Hedge - 5.20.11 - post 1

It finally got above 70 again yesterday so I headed out to the Hedge.  Migration season is starting to wane, but apparently there's still a few new species out there to find.

The really cool one was the Baltimore Oriole that followed me throughout the day.  Either that or there were a half-dozen of these guys out there.

I really, really wish this had come in more in focus.  Well, focused on the bird, not the tree bit in front of him.

Here he is, making sure I was still following him, I think. :)

Of *course* the best shot I get is from underneath him.  This is how my luck goes.

And there was a female Black Duck hanging out in front of the Hedge.  Most of the large wading birds tend to avoid the Hedge, since there's no large body of water within it and Lake Michigan is just beyond it.  She was apparently curious about where all the people were going.

Cardinals are a mainstay of the Hedge.  You can see them (and hear them) all year long.  I like this shot because his crest is up; that's a little more uncommon.

Most of the time, this is what you see of the chipmunks in this park.  Now you see them, now you don't.

But I've discovered this one little guy who lives in a fallen tree.  He's in a particularly interesting area of the Hedge where I often see woodpeckers and other cool birds.  Anyway, he bolts into his warren in there whenever he hears someone coming, but I've learned that if I stand still for a few minutes, he'll come creeping back out to see if the coast is clear.  When he sees me standing there, far enough away to not cause him to bolt back in, he freezes while he decides what I'm up to.  Gives me a great chance to get good pictures of him. :)

Tomorrow I'll post about the fog and bird nests.  You have to get creative when photographing both!  In the mean time, the oriole and the chipmunk go on the new species list.  So that's 30 total so far.  60% a little more than two weeks in.  Not too bad!

Chicago Done Naturally (Post 2 of 10) - The Magic Hedge

Okay, this is my favorite secret Chicago shooting spot. I lived in my apartment at Montrose and the lake for seven years before I discovered this place – and I could walk to it if I wanted to.





To get there, you drive down Montrose heading east (or take the Montrose bus to the Montrose Beach - it only goes that far east during the summer, though). Cross Lake Shore Drive and keep going all the way to the harbor. When you get to a curve in the road with a road on the right, take the right. (Montrose is one side of the top of a Y, it becomes Simmons which is the other side of the top of the Y, you want the street that becomes the bottom of the Y, which really doesn’t have a name.)

Drive around the curve until you see a whole lot of trees and a couple of signs announcing “The Montrose Harbor Bird Sanctuary”. Otherwise known as “The Magic Hedge.”

Quick history: The army built a barracks here back in the day. They put in honeysuckle bushes to give a little privacy to the bottom floor of the barracks. Eventually they left, the buildings came down, but the honeysuckle hedge remained.

Now over 300 different bird species are spotted here each year. Obviously not all at once or anything, but there are more birds than you can point a camera at. I’ve seen robins, cardinals, thrushes, some little yellow thing I still can’t identify, grackles, gulls and others. There’s also a load of squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits. I haven’t seen them yet – I’m guessing it’ll be June before they arrive – but they’ve also got up signs indicating the hedge is a butterfly spotting point.

Oh, it’s also famous for something else – a place to pick up a prostitute. The websites will tell you that since they put up fences around most of the stands of trees, that that’s been curtailed, but I’ve seen evidence that it’s not terribly true. ;) So, yeah, it's gorgeous during the day, but I'd head home around nightfall.

You’ll see other photographers out there no matter when you go. There aren’t a lot of kids and the bird watchers and high school couples you do see are pretty quiet, so it’s a nice quiet place to shoot. These are very wild birds though and will take off at the slightest noise. A good telephoto is your friend.


To hit:
Go as far east as you can through the trees and you’ll eventually reach the lake. You get a pretty awesome view of downtown from there. (This was clearly taken on a very hazy day.)



To miss:
Watch the ground. If it’s not the aforementioned prostitutes, someone’s still having a good time out there. This is probably the tamest evidence of that activity that I've found...