Has anyone warned @copperbadge yet
What a lot of people outside of Chicago may not realize is that The Beans are a native species to this region and right now is baby season! What you're seeing there is probably just an instance of a young mature The Bean being kept in a secure enclosure, probably due to some kind of injury that's being rehabbed.
In urban Chicago around this time of year if you want to go The Bean spotting you mostly just need to keep an eye out around downtown drugstores for formations like this.
I took this picture myself in a Walgreens. As you can see we have a nice healthy-looking family group consisting of a parent The Bean, several juveniles who will often stay with the parent for several years, and some newborns this year who naturally group up protectively near any large sign reading "Chicago".
The Beans are usually extremely docile and can even be kept as pets once the juveniles separate from their family group, since they are low-maintenance and require only a small flat area such as a desk or bookshelf on which to recline. Fun fact, a group of The Beans such as pictured above is known as a Tchochki!
Are adult The Beans usually around the size of the one in the above photo? The most famous one I know of is about three humans tall. Is that a genetic rarity, or is it more like lobsters?
There's a lot of debate in TheBean Biology circles about the massive The Bean residing in Millennium Park. It's not known why this The Bean chose the park or why it has grown to such gargantuan size. I'm not an expert, I just live here, but I tend to agree with the newer theory that they can regularly grow to massive sizes in the wild, but we only tend to encounter smaller ones because such huge sizes generally only occur in deep freshwater lakes.
It's certainly very unusual to see a The Bean of that size on land. Such a privilege to live in a place where they feel safe enough to take up residence alongside humans.
