"Probably this is the same family that has been around the Community Gardens much of the summer," writes Mike Bailey,  "Only one juvenile has survived, but it looks healthy. Now and then as they worked their way through the gardens, one or the other adult would feed the juvenile some tidbit, though the juvenile was doing most of its own foraging.  The last two show one of the adults offering the juvenile a worm that it had plucked out of a compost pile."

I can see an expression of parental pride in the adult as the juvenile is positioning the big worms in his beak. 

Olympia Mathiaparanam spends many days in the Biocore Prairie and the Preserve this summer. Tree frogs are one of her favorites. She captured the two shown here on iPhone and published them on iNaturalist, the nature apps that also helps you identify what you see in Preserve. These small little fellows are hard to detect, as you can imagine from the pictures.  Below: the Holarctic Tree frog hardly covers the bottom of the narrow lance-like leaf pair. The brownish stripe along its side also helps camouflage it. Above: the tiny Gray Tree frog is but a little speck on the huge Prairie dock leaf that he sits on in the Biocore Prairie. 

The Gray tree frog's Latin name is a Hyla versicolor, which means that it can change its color in chameleon like fashion from gray to green, depending on the substrate, and with mottling from black to nearly white. 
Holarctic Tree frogs also belongs to the genus Hyla. The genus, established in 1768, was named after Hylas in Greek mythology, who was the companion of Hercules. Some strong little creature, this tree frog! 
And in case you wanted to know this, if you should plan a trip to Costa Rica, you might want to look for the Gladiator tree frog, all of 1/2 inch body length and with enormous eyes (comparatively) sticking our from its head.

When we think of Goldenrod, at least two things might come to mind—its colorful bloom and those enormous round balls that we often see on the stem of these plants in fall. They are so prominent, these balls, and have such interesting features that they have been studied widely. On our walk through the Biocore Prairie last Saturday with Seth McGee as our leader of the Biocore Program, we observed one in its beginning stages and had a 101 lecture on “what happens here.”
 
We noticed a gall in the making on a rosinweed, which also attracts the goldenrod gall fly (Eurosta solidaginis) or ball maker. Earlier in spring a goldenrod gall fly inserted a fertilized egg into the bud of the plant.  After the larva emerged, in a week or so, it ate its way to the base of the bud and into the spongy middle of the stem and induced a gall. The hormones in the saliva of the larva interacted chemically with the plant tissue, resulting in the growth. Seth  cut the growing gall open to show us the little larva inside. The larva had grown, feeding off the plant. The plant tissue around also expanded in response to the chemicals exuded by the larva. Before the gall ball would harden later in the year, the larva would dig an escape tunnel with its pair of mouth hooks all the way to the plant’s epidermal layer that surrounds the gall. It would survive the winter without freezing to death by emitting further chemicals that act as anti-freeze. In spring after pupation,  the new fly would turn its head in direction of the dermis, pump all its blood into its head to strengthen it, and ram with all its might through the dermis into the open, free to fly. Next time you see a gall on a goldenrod with a hole in it, you will know how the fly escaped. Photos and text, Gisela Kutzbach

Three weeks ago Mike Bailey photographed these two juveniles near the Biocore Prairie. And since then they have grown in leaps and bounds. It's a good year for sandhill cranes at the Preserve, with two pairs raising each a family of two.They are regular visitors to the Community Gardens, where gardeners are very much used to them and where cranes find abundant food. 

On May 19,  Glenda Denniston took this photo of the crane family with 2 colts. The Sandhill Cranes pair, annual residents at the Lakeshore Preserve, are raising these colts the Class of 1918 Marsh.. Watch our for them when you pass through on University Bay Drive.

Arlene Koziol saw him"out of the corner of her eye", while pontooning in the late afternoon on this beautiful Sunday, and "you can see that he was looking right at" her!