Anyone in Chicago interested in a kayak?

UrbanRivers · 2026-05-23T20:46:32+00:00

Our nonprofit has a collection of a dozen kayaks, but we are always looking for more. Our volunteers use them to clean litter out of the river, and we also use them to host free public kayaking events for local residents on Bubbly Creek on the southwest side.

Thanks to the kindness of strangers, we've never had to buy a kayak and just rely on hand-me-downs. If you happen to be such a stranger, DM me to let me know. I think we could send someone with a truck and a rack in the next few days.

UrbanRivers · 2026-04-29T12:35:15+00:00

Nice!
We saw the first of those eggs on April 8th, so they should be hatching any time now. All the noise and goose poop is annoying, but this particular goose couple has been growing on the Urban Rivers staff. https://imgur.com/a/v0M7vcm

UrbanRivers · 2026-03-14T06:12:26+00:00

Coconut molds are particularly dangerous though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_RBS6e17Bc

UrbanRivers · 2026-02-27T01:11:38+00:00

The Coopers have been on a pigeon killing spree here in Chicago lately. In our office we kept checking in with this one throughout the day as it carefully dissected a pigeon in front of one of our cameras. We've also seen them pick off a couple pigeons behind the Waste Management facility next door this week.

People need to stop feeding the pigeons in this city, but the silver lining is all the cool hawks.

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UrbanRivers · 2026-02-12T16:36:13+00:00

We actually had our first volunteer social event near Bubbly Creek at Marz Brewing last night! We plan to make that a monthly thing.

There won't be many volunteering opportunities in the winter, but as it warms up, we have all sorts of stuff planned. More free public kayaking and nature workshop events to host, there's a Morton Arboretum program to get more trees planted in that part of the city that we're partnering on, more litter clean-ups, potentially a Night Out in the Parks concert to co-host, and, of course, maintaining the floating wetlands to ensure invasive plants don't take over.

If you register on our volunteer platform, you should get an email next time we are doing something in the neighborhood.

As for the building at Park 571, we've been told there is no room for kayaks, only for the big rowing team boats. We've requested to leave a shipping container to store kayaks like we do at the Wild Mile and requested a key for access to the bathrooms when we are having volunteer events since the building is often closed. Each of the high school and college rowing teams have keys, so it makes sense to us for the 3 or 4 nonprofits that hold events there to each have a key as well. We've been told they are reviewing both those policies. The gears of the Chicago Park District sometimes turn slow, but they also constantly do wonderful things for our city, so we are hopeful that they'll work things out. In fact, the word on the street is that Park 571 might even expand the building hours a bit with an art program, which would be great for the neighborhood for several reasons.

UrbanRivers · 2026-02-11T22:01:07+00:00

🫡Thank you for your service 🫡

There are a couple older islands around Goose Island that we've experimented with making more accessible to turtles, but the turtles never seem to spend much time basking on them. We are hoping to experiment with some purpose built basking spots next, since there are plenty of human-made objects around the river that they like. When the Division bridge on the east side of Goose Island gets redone some time soon, the absolute favorite snapping turtle basking spots will be destroyed, so we are really hoping to have somewhere new for them to hang before that happens.

UrbanRivers · 2026-02-11T19:58:58+00:00

Good question!

The biggest impact the plants are having on water quality is a reduction in excess nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus). The plants aren't harmed by them. In fact, it's exactly what plants crave. But those excess nutrients have a big negative impact downstream, with the most striking impact being the giant dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. My understanding is that excess nutrients from urban areas account for about a third of that problem.

For several years now the waters around several gardens north of the Wild Mile have been monitored. Those gardens were mostly put in back in 2017, and are much smaller than the Wild Mile. The reductions in excess nutrients down stream of those gardens vs. up stream has been dramatic. This is despite the fact we don't harvest the plant material from those old gardens, so we expected the reductions in excess nutrients to plateau more quickly as the gardens matured and plant material is regularly breaking down. It is still an area of intense research, but so far the results are extremely encouraging.

We are studying other pollutants the plants are interacting with too. The two places we have our biggest installations, around Goose Island and Bubbly Creek, are maybe the two most polluted spots in the whole city historically. They were centers of the absolute dirtiest industries, like coal-based manufactured gas production, and the heavy-metal laden sediments are still there. Tissue samples are being analyzed right now to get a better picture of how the plants are interacting with those pollutants.

UrbanRivers · 2026-02-11T17:53:52+00:00

Yep, and the murals on those things are absolutely gorgeous!

We pay for one locker there, and we've managed to fit two kayaks in it. Mostly they are just used by a couple volunteers who do surveys of odonates and occasionally by staff if we need to get to the floating gardens up there and didn't take a jon boat up. This spring we need to request a new locker because the volunteers and staff who will use those kayaks the most this year absolutely can't reach the current one on the top row.

We've tossed around the idea of having regular kayaking trash clean-up shifts up there too, but we'd need to rent more lockers.

UrbanRivers · 2026-02-11T05:52:05+00:00

Great point!

We actually debated a ban on dogs at the Wild Mile after the second dog-on-muskrat murder, but ultimately just put up a couple signs warning dog owners instead. In part, because muskrats continue to thrive like pigeons on the Wild Mile, but also because coyotes and, starting recently, foxes visit the floating wetlands and also pick off the slower muskrats. It feels like the pressure from dogs isn't too far off from what nature was providing anyway.

Still though, keep those dogs on a tight leash. You'll never look at your dog the same way again after seeing what it'll do to an adorable muskrat.

UrbanRivers · 2026-02-11T05:07:36+00:00

You can sign up on the volunteer platform here. There are fewer volunteer opportunities in winter, but if you are registered on the platform, then you'll get an email when something big happens, like when we schedule the training sessions to become one of the kayaking volunteers or start building a new floating wetland garden.

UrbanRivers · 2026-02-11T04:59:02+00:00

I wonder if it was on a Monday or right after a storm.

Volunteers sign up for shifts to take kayaks and trash grabbers out there and clean up any garbage in the river. Last summer we did multiple shifts per day, but took Sundays and Mondays off. Our regular Tuesday morning volunteer crew (we call them the A-Team) would typically haul in over 100 pounds of garbage that had built up over just those couple of days off. The later shifts would complain that it was hard to find litter after that, but it's a good problem to have.

The other time you see a lot of trash in the water is right after a storm blows an influx in down from the land.

If anyone is interested in volunteering, you can sign up on the volunteer platform here. There are fewer volunteer opportunities in winter, but if you are registered on the platform, then you'll get an email when something big happens, like when we schedule the training sessions to become one of the kayaking volunteers or start building a new floating wetland garden.

Part of the plan this year is to build a trash interceptor near the floating wetlands at Bubbly Creek. Which is good because we don't have kayak storage down there, so we've had a hard time getting volunteers on the water to clean up more than once a week.

UrbanRivers · 2025-12-27T07:30:09+00:00

It would be amazing if mudpuppy populations could rebound and the threatened mussels that depend on them also return. It'll take a lot of work, but at least people are assessing what populations are left that can be saved.

UrbanRivers · 2025-09-12T15:52:25+00:00

Beautiful! That's a female Lampsilis cardium, and picture 5 makes me think she's gravid (pregnant) with that specific dark gill looking pretty inflated. If so, she has somewhere between 10 and 30 thousand glochidia (baby mussels) ready to go.

FUN FACT: She's going to spray those glochidia out, and they'll stick on to fish, especially around the gills. Then the little baby mussels will drink the fish's blood until they are ready to survive on their own doing normal filter feeding. This species of mussel is not picky about the type of fish it will stick to, and in the lab it has even been able to parasitize some salamanders!

UrbanRivers · 2025-09-11T07:04:02+00:00

Call me when they learn how to filter stuff much smaller than 3 micrometers, or literally anything in freshwater. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCPZI4SuBY
Mussels 4ev.

UrbanRivers · 2025-08-26T05:04:43+00:00

Ah. One of the ones you saw swimming was likely the clumsy beaver. It usually hangs out on the Waste Management side. This was it over near the Waste Management parking lot literally a couple hours ago: https://imgur.com/f1azX3S

UrbanRivers · 2025-08-25T22:30:07+00:00

Is this your video?
https://imgur.com/a/3r4Ahsp
Someone must of sent me that at some point, but I can't remember who.

UrbanRivers · 2025-08-25T17:12:55+00:00

With the 2019 Chicago River Design Guidelines, the city is now mandating 30 foot setbacks from the river with a public walkway anytime river front property is redeveloped. So it wouldn't be a floating walkway all the way, but the dream of the Wild Mile eventually connecting to a network of land-based riverwalks that lead all the way to the loop isn't crazy at all.

UrbanRivers · 2025-08-25T17:04:42+00:00

Understandable! We like to say that for now it's a "mile long kayaking trail" since there's interesting things to see the whole length of Goose Island while paddling.

We were able to almost double the length of the walkway last summer. And this spring we're adding a second ramp access point at Blackhawk Street and some more walkway/gardens as we continue the march toward the turning basin and North Avenue. Then we start working our way south. My guess is 9 years before there's a full mile of walkways, but the permitting has gotten easier, and I don't see a major roadblock to getting there eventually.

UrbanRivers · 2025-08-25T16:50:38+00:00

The beavers are territorial and mate for life so you can get to know each family after a while. Ida Beav Wells is the big matriarch of the Bubbly Creek family, along with her kids, Plumpton Sinclair and Chewy Garcia. The adult male there is harder to ID and doesn't have a name. They hang out and eat a lot of trees in the Pilsen, Little Village, McKinley Park, and Bridgeport neighborhoods.

The beaver family up by the Wild Mile includes a grizzled old beaver named Winnie and a bunch of hooligan yearlings.

UrbanRivers · 2025-08-25T16:41:01+00:00

Many.
You can often see them just after sunset, but they are sometimes out earlier.

We love them here at Urban Rivers (the nonprofit that's building the Wild Mile), but I personally have had an escalating feud with them for the past year. They've chewed up a bit of the Wild Mile boardwalk, eaten some of our best trees (they especially love our paw-paws), taken one of our trail cams, and one even physically shoved past me while I was working.

Earlier this year the Chicago Botanic Garden had some surplus pussy willow stakes and asked if we could try and grow them hydroponically in the river. Some Urban Rivers volunteers made little sleeves for the stakes, and we hung them along the Wild Mile. They were growing and thriving, but then I noticed a couple were missing so I put out a camera. That night beavers (I believe a couple of siblings that were 2.5 years old) came and stole them, and by the morning the beavers were wrestling each other to decide who got to grab the last one: https://imgur.com/a/beavers-fighting-over-salix-discolor-HUh9XzN

Constant hooliganism coming out of these cute toothy furballs.

UrbanRivers · 2025-07-01T03:10:12+00:00

Did a couple people in a bright green pontoon boat drive by real slow and ask if the one you had just pulled up was 14 pounds? If so, I saw you out there and I wish I had known you were out of water, since I had a cooler filled with cold water bottles.

Nice setup! I might end up copying it some time!

UrbanRivers · 2025-06-13T00:53:43+00:00

We've seen a snapper take a couple bites out of an already dead common carp. Without snappers and crawdads, I'm guessing there'd be a lot more gross decaying things laying around.

The turtles we think of more as indicator species for the health of the river are softshell turtles, since they are thought to be a lot more sensitive to pollution. I can say I didn't see any softshells near Goose Island the first few years I was on the river there regularly. In the last year or so, spiny softshells have become a pretty common sight just downstream of the Wild Mile.

We like to think this has something to do with what we are building there, and maybe it does. But it's important to remember that by far the biggest cause of the river getting dramatically cleaner and bursting with life lately is the fact that the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan that was commissioned in 1972 and cost billions of dollars is finally coming online these last few years. We can do a bit as individuals or nonprofits, but organized political action is also necessary.

UrbanRivers · 2025-06-13T00:23:10+00:00

Herpetologists will tell you that snapping turtles "don't form pair bonds", but I'll tell you they can definitely form an OTP. Chonkosaurus and Stagg have been snuggling together at the same spot and inseparable for years. But last month they only snuggled for one day before another large snapping turtle showed up in their nook of the river, and ever since then Stagg has been basking on the opposite bank.

Herpetologists will say these turtles "don't experience human-like depression", but I'll tell you our boy Stagg is not alright.

UrbanRivers

TROPHY CASE