Urban wildlife, Franklin Park Zoo service area edition.

[urbpan]

This box is at the service entrance of the zoo. This is where you go if you are bringing a truckload of meat or pine shaving to the zoo. The box has a button and a speaker on it to talk to Security to have them come and let you in. None of this activity seems to bother the American robins who built a nest on it and raised some chicks there.




A coworker picked some lily of the valley blossoms and noticed that one of them contained a very small caterpillar (2mm long or so). She handed the flower to me and said, "you can have the buggy one."


These mushrooms were growing out of the sand alongside the building where I work. There's also a little Ailanthus sapling nearby, so they might have been growing in association with that. I posted several pictures of them on Facebook and the mycologists agree: Little Brown Mushrooms. David William Fischer said "Most likely this is in the Pholiota family..." while Noah Siegel said flat out "It's an Agrocybe... If you want to put a name on it call it Agrocybe pediades group, that's the name that gets applied to about 20 species of little brown Agrocybe." Both mycologists agreed that only an idiot would try to identify them without a microscope. I thought they were cool because they were growing in sand.


Here's yet another American robin nest, this one built on part of what I will laughingly call (in this case) our quarantine cages. Either the pest control manager or the hospital keeper should have caught this before the eggs were laid. (Note: I am both the pest control manager and the hospital keeper.) Fortunately songbirds fledge quickly, and the chicks had moved on when I checked on it today, and tore the thing down.

Comments

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

i've been noticing a lot of robin's nest being built at eye or lower level in the oddest places that aren't bushes or shrubbery... like, just sitting on a picnic table under an overhand at a "camp" i visit. nothing to stop a raccoon from stretching up and nomming for instance.

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[momomom.livejournal.com]

Robins built a nest on my brothers deck railing at the point where it joined his house this year. Currently has 3 eggs.