Date: 10/29/21, 
6-7pm
Location: Lakefront path to Montrose Harbor
Conditions: Overcast, around 63°
Focus: Final project reflection
Observations
-4 coyotes spotted on the golf course - large, mostly gray with one dark brown. Almost looked like wolves from a distance, but more than likely to be coyotes.
-spotted a large bird fly overhead - either a falcon or hawk
-milkweed pods were covered in black/orange insects
-family of raccoons were out at dusk - a couple came to feed them food scraps
Reflection
I hadn't planned on doing a BCI on this particular night, but the observations came naturally while out walking this evening. First was an extremely rare sight of coyotes in the city - not just one, but four of them hanging around on the golf course I walk by regularly. Coyotes are spotted periodically in the Chicago suburbs and areas nearer to forest preserves, but are rarely reported in the city. I had never seen one in the city until last year during the pandemic. I don't know if their presence here, or the fact that there were so many together, stemmed from the pandemic at all. But it's just one of many unusual wildlife sightings I've had in the last year and a half, and I'm happy to be reminded that these animals are still living amongst us. I hope that the effects of the pandemic that encouraged the return of wildlife to areas they previously avoided is something that will not return to the way it was - we should be able to exist alongside nature without completely taking over its habitat.

The vision behind my design project was to encourage wider adoption of sustainable practices by some of the biggest sources of environmental degradation. If industry could see the value of ecosystem services and how nature has the solutions to many of our problems, maybe we can get to a point of working with nature instead of against it to try and solve those problems.
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