Fall Updates: Spooky Edition 🎃

Pups, programs, and even vampires?! abound at the Wild Mile this October. Read all about our spooky ongoings, and be sure to scroll to the end for old staff Halloween photos our moms wouldn’t want you to miss.

Happy Howl-oween!

Meet the marvelous pets of the Wild Mile

Come one, come all, and join us on the Wild Mile for Howl-oween! Bring your own furry friend in their Sunday (or Saturday) best to compete in our Wild Mile Pet Costume Contest. The best-dressed pet, as judged completely subjectively by our staff, will win a prize!

No pet? No worries! Bring your whole family out to sip warm cider while learning about urban coyotes and native seed dispersal. Kid-friendly crafts and candy will be offered on the boardwalk, and our knowledgable staff and volunteers will be around to teach attendees some nature-y fun facts!

Profoundly Popular Programming

5 months, more than 3000 participants

The end of September marked the close of our summer community programming season. We’re incredibly grateful for everyone who came to one of our events, as well as the donors and sponsors that made it all possible. We’re already looking forward to next year! If you have an idea in mind for 2024 collaborations or sponsorships, email team@urbanriv.org

River Rangers help participants out of kayaks at Park 571

Nature’s True Vampires

The spooky side of freshwater mussels

Freshwater mussels are bivalve molluscs that live by filtering water to extract nutrients and subsequently help to clean our waterways. Though perhaps unassuming, these mussels reproduce in a truly spooky and fascinating way.

From inside their coffin-like shell, gravid (pregnant) female mussels can produce hundreds of mussel larvae at a time. They will wait for an unsuspecting fish to pass by before discharging their larvae into the fish’s face, coating their gills. The larvae then latch on to the gills and draw blood from the fish for food until they reach a certain maturity, dropping off to begin lives on their own. You can check out the parasitic process for yourself in this video.

These real life vampires are some of the most important organisms in supporting healthy rivers, but they are also some of the most endangered in the world due to extensive alteration to their habitat. At the Wild Mile, we are working to restore their habitat by building submerged garden modules that mimic the sandy river bottoms they need. But how do the mussels get to our gardens in the first place?

In the winter, we go out looking for gravid female mussels and bring them back to the DuPage County Urban Stream Research Center, where they can extract the larvae (glochidia) and raise the juveniles in a protected place, escorting them through the most vulnerable part of their life cycles.

Thanks to sponsorship from Google and 11th Hour Racing's grant program (funded by The Schmidt Family Foundation), we continue to hunt for and build critical habitat for these elusive creatures. Unlike Beowulf, though, we always return the mama mussels back to her home after stealing hundreds of her children… for science.

Halloween Nostalgia

Office insights

Thinking of Halloween can bring back a lot of fond memories and maybe even some embarrassing photos. Which is exactly why we asked the Urban Rivers office to share an old photo of themselves dressed up for the holiday. Our moms shouldn’t be the only ones to enjoy these childhood classics.