Just a few minutes down the road from our house is a most magnificent nature haven! It's a 2.25 mile loop around the Pike River. We spend hours upon hours here, either walking or biking. This past year we identified over 30 prairie plants and have enjoyed observing all of the changes throughout the seasons.
Here are a few things we saw on our nature walk today:
We were able to get really close to this snake and see its sides expand as it breathed.
This little patch of Illinois Bundleflower was so pretty all summer. The flowers are little, white puffs and the leaves are wispy and fern-like. Now it has produced its seeds in small, twisted, wafer-like pods that sound like tiny maracas when you shake them!
This is what the kids refer to as our "Big Slough" where "millions of rustling grass-blades made one murmuring sound, and thousands of wild ducks and geese and herons and cranes and pelicans were talking sharply and brassily in the wind." (By the Shores of Silver Lake)
It's fun to pretend! Actually it is home to one Great Blue Heron, a Green Heron, some ducks, and thousands of red-winged blackbirds that make quite a busy sound in the early evenings of summer. We were out of town for one week at the end of August. When we came back the blackbirds had gone away for the winter and it was so quiet -- it seemed like a different place.
The kids counted 108 grasshoppers today.
The Milkweed pods have popped!
Small white Asters.
We found this book to be an excellent resource for identifying prairie flowers.
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