Today is June 21st and the first day of Summer which is also the longest day of the entire year. I made a trip to St. Cloud in the morning with a very brief visit to Munsinger and Clemens Gardens near the river. But by 3:20 in the afternoon I arrived back in the Twin Cities for a nice and long 2+ hour hike at the park. The flurry of spring migrant birds has been over for some time now, but there are a lot of other interesting things to see this time of year. After parking at the culdesac on 73rd Avenue and heading south, I ran into flooded trails that were just too deep to walk through. In 5+ years of hiking around the park, I think this is maybe only the 2nd time I've ever had to detour down Oliver Avenue and all the way down to 69th Avenue just to be able to make my way around the entire loop. But when I got back on the trail, I noticed this big Dragonfly just waiting for me to take it's picture against a nice green background.
I had learned in the past year or so to count the number of spots or patches on the wings. This one has 3 dark patches on each of it's 4 wings, making it a Twelve-spotted Skimmer. But what I didn't know is that you can tell it is a female. A male would also have white patches in between the dark patches. I think that is pretty neat! Shortly afterward I'd spotted a brief glimpse of a Green Heron who was perched quite low near the tiny little pond along 69th Avenue. I was bummed because he flew up from his spot right along the trail as I approached. But I saw where he landed and I decided to see if I could close again.
He was hanging in the taller trees now on the other side of the pond and I was then able to kind of sneak up on him a little just because there were so many other trees and leaves in the way. Green Herons are a quite beautiful bird and can look slightly different each time I see them. This photo was taken right before he flew off again, but I really like that I caught his bright yellow eye in the sunlight! Probably the single most interesting sighting of my walk today came next as I spotted what first looked like a small snake in the bushes! It was mostly dark and with green stripes giving me the initial impression of a Garter Snake. But upon closer inspection it was quite a large Caterpillar. It was about 4 inches long with a bright orange head and also a sizeable orange spike on it's rear! I have never seen anything like it before.
While it chowed down on a plant, I took quite a few photos hoping to ID it later on. And after someone pointed me in the right direction, I was able to narrow it down to a "White-lined Sphinx Moth" Caterpillar. There have been a lot of baby birds or "fledgelings" around the park lately. Some of these can be really tough to identify which species they are as they don't quite show the color or behavior that you're used to seeing in the adults. I saw quite a few young birds that I think were Common Grackles because they were surrounding an adult Grackle in a tree and begging for food.
Then shortly later I spotted this one having a bath in the flooded trails on the west side. Adult Grackles have yellow eyes but this ones were grey. However you can kind of see hints of the iridescent purple/blue plumage already developing on it's head. The last item I want to share here today is actually a video, which I don't post that often. To my surprise, I again saw bird activity at the little tree stump on the south end of the park along one of the wood chip trails. I first noticed Black-capped Chickadees appearing to excavate an already existing hole in the very middle of this stump that was cut off at an angle. That was well over a month ago on May 5th! Today I could clearly hear young birds chirping inside the hole so I waited here for a bit. Sure enough a Chickadee came in with a mouthful of food and hopped down into the hole.
So I tried my best here to capture a quick video. For whatever reason, the adult appears to leave again with the food still in it's bill, making me wonder if the young ones rejected it for some reason. Still this is pretty neat and is the first confirmed Chickadee nest I have found in the park.
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