159,000,000

That's how many trees there were in Chicago as of 2019, according to the US Department of Agriculture. I had a hard time believing that myself, and did a spot check. On the half-block where i Live there are cose to thirty trees in the [arkway and in yards. This is a short sstretch with three parking lots.

Between 2000 and 2010, the City planted about half a million trees. I've notice another surge in tree planting jut in the parts of Lincoln Park that I pass on the bus. In one stretch between Diversey Harbor and Belmont there are ovr two dozen nenw trees. That's only about half a mile.

Chicago s rapidly becoming The City in a Forest.

The Sparrows Are Back!

There's a flock of sparrows that roosts in a towering mulberry tree in the side yard. In the winter they move to a fairly tall juniper bush next to it -- tallenough to make them feel secure, and with very dense foliage, wihch must make it easier to stay warm.

Over the summer they disappeared. I suspect it was because of the cicadas -- we had cicadas in all the trees on my street, at least one to every tree, and the racket, starting in the afternoon and lasting throught he night, was increcible. I'm convinced that the sparrows left because they couldn't get any sleep.

At any rate, they've started coming back over the past few weeks -- I can hear them twittering their "Good night, sleep tight" chirps in the vening, and their wake-up chatter in the morning, and they've started appearing in the parkway, hopping around looking for something to eat.

It's sort of reassuring to have them back.

Sparrows

One of the ubiquitous parts of city life is sparrows. By "sparrows", od course, I mean the English sparrows that somehow made their way from Europe in the distant past and made themselves at home.(There are native sparrows, but unless you've got a keen eye and a good bird book, they tend to vanish in the crowd.)

What brings this to mind is the juniper bush outside my front door -- at least, it started life as a bush. It's grown intoa bushy tree, about 20 feet high, with very dense foliage -- a perfect place for sparrows to roost at nigh -- sheldter from the elements, high enough to discourage wandering cats and rats.

However, the racket from a flock of sparrows waking up in the morning has to be heard to be believed -- everyone wishing everyone a good morning, taking roll call, who knows?

Sign du Jour

Sign in the window of Chicago Bagel Authority on Belmont Avenue:

With thanks to commenter fuzzybits at Joe.My.God.

You Know It's a Crisis

when your grocery store runs out of tortillas.

I Know This Feeling

with thanks to commenter Michael R at Joe.My.God.

Rabbits Are Magical

We have a couple of rabbits on our block. I see them sometimes munching away at a patch of lawn across the street, usually only one, but sometimes two, usually in the evening, but sometimes in the morning. They also browse around the garden at my place.

And they appear and disappear without warning. This morning I was out and saw one across the street, and when I turned to come back inside, the other one had appeared. They do that. The other evening I was out and the one across the street suddenly just vanished.

I've seen that happen before -- I was at the Zoo just outside the south entrance, and there was a rabbit browsing just inside the fence, next to a shrub. There was a squirrel foraging on the other side of the shrub, and sure enough, they were suddenly face to face. The squirrel levitated about three feet and the rabbit just disappeared. Gone. Poof.

They're also really good at holding very, very still, so they're hard to see to begin with.

It's January 25th

And this morning I saw a flock of robins eating juniper berries from the tree in the front yard.

Didn't anyone tell them they're supposed to go south for the winter?

(And this was while it was still dark outside. Paris is not the only "City of Light".

The City In a Forest

So yesterday, as I was about to come in the front gate, there was a rabbit sitting on the sidewalk, for the second evening in a row. I stopped, we chatted (well, I chatted; the rabbit was chewing on something), and then I decided I had to come in, since it was a little chilly.

The rabbit decided it was time to go somewhere else.

It really is like living in the woods, sometimes.

This Must Be Some Sort of Landmark

Chicago now has, in addition to the restaurant on North Clark Street featuring Vietnamese and Yugoslavian cuisine, a Nepalese restaurant on North Broadway.

I have a feeling that before too much longer, if there's some group that cooks food, they'll open a restaurant here.

Signs of the Times

Riding down Clark Street on the bus, I passed a new restaurant featuring Vietnamese and Yugoslav cuisine.

You can find anything in Chicago.

The Mark of a True Chicagoan

I was on my way home yesterday afternoon, riding the express bus up Lake Shore Drive. The temperature was eleven degrees. And sure enough, there were people out having their afternoon run in the park, and walking their dogs. OK -- if you're running, your generating heat and you don't feel the cold. And the dog has to be walked.

And then there were the people out for a stroll. Just walking along, observing the geese trying to find open water (the harbors and ponds are frozen over, and there's floe ice along the shore).

Well, it's Chicago.

(Actually, I'm dealing with the cold much better than I expected. My body must have had time to acclimate.)

Stray Thought: Trees

Did you ever think how big trees get? I don't mean trees like giant Sequoias or redwoods, I mean everyday sorts of trees like oaks and maples and locusts and such.

Maybe it's because I live in Chicago -- the "city in a garden" that might as well be called the "city in a forest". There are trees just about everywhere, especially in the older residential neighborhoods. Some of those are over a hundred years old. But even walking down a major commercial street, you notice that even the younger trees are a couple of stories tall. The older ones can easily top four stories, and even then, those are not really old trees -- maybe twenty or thirty years old, which is nothing for a tree.

There's an ash tree outside my window that pretty much covers three out of four windows facing that direction. I'm on a high second floor (the first floor is all commercial spaces), and I can just see the top of it from my window. The top is up into the third story, so it's at least twenty-five or thirty feet tall, and it's not really an old tree.

There are a couple of locusts up in the next block that I can see from the front door that tower over the buildings -- they're easily forty feet tall. And the maple next door is just about level with the roof of the building -- a three-story apartment building with a high basement, making it almost four stories.

Sadly, I can't find any pictures online that give a good idea of what I'm talking about here, so you'll just have to use your imagination. Or look out the window.

Last Light

I went out for the last smoke of the day just at dusk. There was still light from the sun reflecting off the windows of the high-rises along the lake, the lower-rises closer to my place were in shadow -- not deep shadow, but not lighted, except by the street lamps -- and the moon was about a quarter of the way up the sky and perfectly round and still pretty big -- not as big as at moonrise, but larger than it would be later, higher in the sky.

I love this city -- everywhere you look, there's a picture.

(Which maybe means I should poke myself and start taking pictures again.)

So I Went to the Zoo

Red-breasted merganser

It was yesterday, actually. I saw two rabbits, a mouse, red-breasted mergansers, another diving duck I couldn't identify, and a pair of geese with eleven goslings -- according to the lady who followed them from Wells and St. Paul to South Pond, about half a mile or more, and across a couple of busy streets. And lots of turtles basking.

Oh, and the animals in the Zoo collections, of course.

Scenes from the City

There's this pushcart vendor who sets up in front of the Centro Romero, which occupies a large portion of the first floor of my building. He gets the business from Centro Romero and the school across the street (although the kids seem to hang out at Dunkin' Donuts).

So I'm standing outside last evening and he pushes his cart up to Dunkin' and goes inside to get a drink -- probably coffee.

I guess he doesn't stock whatever he bought.

Spring in Chicago

It was in the 30s when I got up this morning, and there was snow on the ground, which has since melted, probably because it's raining. And windy. Really windy.

And, after the City worked on the sewers on my corner for six months last year, the street outside the front door is, once again, a small lake -- water from one side to the other. Probably because no one ever bothers to clean the dead leaves off the storm drains.

I've Sort Of Been Waiting For This

So I was outside, and an elderly lady had been out walking her dog and decided to stop at the Dunkin' Donuts across the street. Instead of tying the dog to a lamp post outside and going in for a doughnut (it's really nasty out, with a howling north wind), she walked the dog through the drive-through.

Makes sense to me.

Signs of the Times

So there's this poster on CTA buses advertising a clinical study for a pain reliever for post-shingles pain. At the top there's a picture of a man in pain and the headline against a gray background that says "Are your shingles gone but the pain remains?"

The problem is, the word shingles is in orange that's the same shade as the gray background -- that is, no contrast.

So I read it as "Are your thingies gone but the pain remains?"

Stand Off

So there's this mouse. I can't really call it "my" mouse, although I have seen it skittering around the baseboards out of the corner of my eye a couple of times. I was thinking it was living under the floor, between my floor and the ground floor ceiling. At any rate, I'm pretty much a live and let live sort of person (except for cockroaches), so I wasn't bothered by it at all.

Your basic mouse

And then, a bit ago as I was heading toward the shower, it ran right across the middle of the living room floor toward the bookcases. I stopped. It stopped. And we just sort of stood there looking at each other for a while, me wondering whether I really need to do anything about the mouse,* and the mouse -- well, who knows what the mouse was thinking?

So I moved a couple more steps toward the bathroom and the mouse pivoted to keep me in sight. And we stood there looking at each other for another couple of minutes.

And then I went and took my shower.

* I had thought of live-trapping it and taking it to South Pond and letting it go, either on the side toward the Farm in the Zoo or on the other side, where there's an extensive wild planting will all sorts of flowering plants. But it's a little late in the season for that, and I'm afraid it wouldn't have time to fatten up and dig a burrow or whatever it is that mice do in the wild. So I guess we'll stick with the status quo, at least for the time being.