A good day at the Chicago Botanic Garden, for once. It was a nice day, and there were lots of birds. One of them — a WINTER WREN — was a lifer for us both. We saw this dark brown bird with a short, stubby tail dash in front of us, and Pole immediately guessed what it was. We saw it a couple of more times flitting through the shrubbery, and so her hunch was confirmed.

We also so a huge number of golden-crowned kinglets in the deep grasses beside the one of the paths. (I guess that many birds means it was an official flock.) Working a nearby tree was a chubby brown creeper. We then walked the prairie, which was mostly chest high and full of goldfinches and sparrows. And a solitary snipe. Oh, and I don’t want to neglect mentioning the great blue heron that landed about twenty feet away from us, turned its back, and relieved itself prodigiously. We’ve never be so close to a heron before, which I now realize is a good thing.