“Hey, it’s good to be back home again”

It was great to be back in Estabrook Park this morning, and the gorgeous, late-October weather was icing on the cake.

Even better, both the wood ducks and the pied-billed grebe, none of which will be staying for the winter, were all still on the pond. Here are four of the nine wood ducks, …

and here’s the pied-billed grebe, looking as cute as ever.

We are in the year-round range for song sparrows, but they’ve quit singing for the year, and sightings will fall off over the winter, so it’s best to get our looks in now, while we can.

Meanwhile, sightings of bald eagles in Estabrook reach their peak over the winter, so I expect that we’ll get to see these even more often as the cold sets in, especially when all the water upstream freezes over.

Finally, I did see one sulphur butterfly as I crossed the southern soccer fields, but when I focused my camera on where I thought I saw it land, this is who I found instead. From a distance, I thought it was a western honeybee, but upon closer inspection, it appears to be our very first common drone fly (Eristalis tenax), “the most widely distributed syrphid species in the world.” How fun!

Finally, if you were thinking to yourself a couple of weeks ago, when I mentioned that Friends of Estabrook and Milwaukee RiverKeepers were both hosting events on Saturday, “Gee, I wish I had known sooner. I would have joined the fun.” Well, here’s your second chance, with slightly more advanced warning.

Friends of Estabrook is hosting another weed-out on Saturday, October 31, from 9 am to Noon, and “Milwaukee Birders and the Garden Club of Greater Milwaukee are working with Milwaukee Riverkeepers for a fall clean-up of Lincoln Creek at Havenwoods” State Forest on Saturday, Oct 31, from 9:00-11:00am. Friends of Estabrook plan to work you an extra hour, but they also promise to make up for it with “FREE BEVERAGES at the BIERGARTEN following the WEED-OUT.”

Now, I can’t say for certain that this is a “Workers in the Vineyard” type of situation, where you can show up at the Estabrook weed-out after helping with the clean-up of Lincoln Creek and still get free beer, but is sure seems worth a try, doesn’t it?