A Sign of the Times . . .

Your earworm for the day  ;-)  I thought I'd share some photos today.

We are having a cooler than usual August here in Chicagoland, and really, it just takes a few nights for things to start happening . . . Here are some photos from my walks in the last week or so.  

The sumac is one of the first to turn every year, and this year, some of the maples are not far behind.

Another bit of maple at the edge of the pond . . .

And this morning's small cottonwood . . .

And the leaves from a "volunteer" cottonwood on the path.  Metra (the train I used to take to work) black-topped the entire path last week.  It really needed it and looks brand new again  :-)  They've been working on our little train station, and the village must have made a deal with them to do a little more work, because in addition to the path . . .

 

 

. . . they installed the new fountain in the main retention pond (and a second one in the north side-pond).  I'm reasonably sure it's to assist with mosquito abatement.  It seemed so loud to me the first day it was up and running, but it doesn't bother me now.

 

 

It feels like I was just taking photos of the willows leafing out . . . there are at least six of them around the pond, this is the biggest one. 

 

My cousin asked me how I can stand walking the same route all the time.  She and her husband have been to all the forest preserves around and she says it's getting boring.  I don't know, but I never find the retention pond boring, and three laps and there and back to the house is 3 miles.  I've been trying to get back to 3 miles a day for a very long time, and I know I make it when I walk there.  Anyway, I never know what I'm going to see there - the pond truly is different every day.  Last week I saw this cormorant, which was a thrill because in all the years I've been walking around this pond, not only I have never seen a cormorant there before, I have never actually seen a cormorant of any kind before!  !

 

 

I suppose it's silly, but I fell in love with cormorants when I was a little girl in the first grade.  Back then (early 1960s), many grocery stores had weekly premiums.  We got an entire set of the Funk & Wagnall's encyclopedia that way (and, in fact, I just stopped getting the annual yearbooks about eight years ago!).  But when I was in the first grade, one of the grocery stores had sticker books.  There were two.  Dinosaurs for boys and Birds for girls (hey, it was a different time . . . ).  These were large soft-bound books where you'd place the stickers every week by the description of the bird - so your mom had to go to the store every week or you wouldn't get all the stickers.  The most beautiful bird sticker was the one for a cormorant.  I'm guessing it was a Pelagic Cormorant, because I clearly remember that it was the most beautiful bird I had ever seen in my little life - and I've never forgotten it.  So, seeing any sort of cormorant was a pretty big deal for me.  The one in my photo is a young Double-Crested Cormorant. 

Anyway, the pond rarely disappoints in birds - waterfowl, in particular.

 

I went out twice this weekend.  It was my cousin's birthday yesterday.  This is how my family gathers during the summer of COVID.  We're all at least six feet apart.  I only stay for about an hour.  

And I thought you might like to see the sunflowers that my cousins grow in their garden.  They are just past their peak.  They are about 12 feet tall.  I'm not kidding.

Here's a close up of one of the flower heads.  It's about the size of a basketball.  Seriously.

 

 

This was today's treasure at the pond.  It's an American Goldfinch. It was sitting there on that dead branch when I came around the turn, just singing its little heart out.  It let me get pretty close and I photographed it from a couple of angles. 

 

Sing along . . .