Today was my Mother's birthday!!! When my family and I went to Calumet Park beach to go swimming, we saw a bunch of cool stuff. We saw tons of cicada hawks flying around, a huge wasp-mimic fly, a cute & small stink bug hunting wasp, a predatory fly, a gorgeous goldfinch, and tons of plants! Yay!!!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!!
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| Cicada-hawk, also known (rather judgingly) as the Cicada-killer Wasp. It's important to remember that they only paralyze, lay their eggs on, bury, and have their larvae eat cicadas to survive. Nature is not interested in human ethics, nor can it be aptly labeled by our value judgements. It is neither good nor bad: it simply is |
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| Sassy wasp goin' zoooooooooooomm!!!!!!! |
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| Northeastern Hammertail eating a Common Green Bottle Fly |
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| Dramatic nom-noms |
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| A species of predatory wasp in the genus Astata. North American species of Astata are A. bicolor, A. leuthstromi, A. occidentalis, and A. unicolor |
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| Staring into the distance, rather likely for stink bugs |
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| Clubbed Mydas Fly |
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| Mydas fly and lichens |
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| Male Mayfly. I can tell it's a male because those two, er, cheeks of the behind-lookin' things are its upper eyes, and only some males have huge upper eyes. They're to spot females flying overhead. |
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| Thriving dune praire habitat planted by the parks district? The former is correct. The latter is not. These plants grew on their own. They're actually on an originally bare sand pile in the Calumet Park beach parking lot |
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| That's a lot of plants |
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| Beautiful, lush sand piles |
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| Ah, erosion controlling plants. The sand piles even have natural buffers against ecological collapse |
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| The grass on the abandoned sand pile is greener than the grass on the lawn. This photo makes the lawn grass look healthier than it actually was |
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| Green Carpetweed, also on the sand pile |
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| American Goldfinch on some sand pile thistle |
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Mm, those are some yummy thistle seeds, grown straight from the abandoned sand pile surrounded with putrid, dried up sewage runoff!
Every photo in this post was taken on or near the sand piles, except for the Cicada Hawk |
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