Wildlife Sightings

I had a great day for suburban wildlife sightings... I saw:

• A muskrat, dragging a stick through the water.  It was right in front of me, very close, until JUST the second when I had my camera out and ready... then it dove under.
• Green herons, which seem to be very common right now.
• A poor baby vole, who seemed to be injured, which made me very sad.
• Some other rodent -- I think a chipmunk based on its size and color, atop a compass plant eating the seeds.  We scared it away before I got a great view, but you don't often see mammals six feet off the ground on something as slender as a compass plant stem.  It was cool.  
• A cormorant on the lake.
• Tons of woolly bears -- which I think of a cool weather caterpillars, so I guess that's a sign of fall. 
• Leopard frogs.
• Monarchs, practically posing on NE aster:

• This egret, either several times, or I saw several egrets throughout the course of the day.  In this instance, it landed on a dead tree near the class of kindergarteners I was teaching, then swooped into the pond, where we watched it walking in its smooth, deliberate way for a while. We had hoped it would catch a fish in front of us, but it didn't.  Speaking of fish, we also saw those, including a really big one that flopped out of the water.