Nature at Home

     Nature is everywhere, all the time, including on one's own lawn.  Sometimes a lawn appears quiet as though nothing is living on it.  But at other times, it is lively with small creatures. 
     Our small town lawn during the evening of August 23, 2014 was interesting to me as strolled through it.  Several big carpenter bees were busily visiting the large rose-of Sharon flowers in our yard and a neighbor's.  Their bodies were covered with the dusty pollen of those blooms as they buzzed from blossom to blossom, pollinating each flower they visited.  During the coming winter, small, seed-eating birds will eat the seeds of those shrubs that will result from that fertilization.
     A little later that same evening at home, I heard a few male annual cicadas whining shrilly in the trees.  They flap horny plates under their abdomens to make that buzzing to draw females of their kind to them for mating.  As I was hearing those cicadas, I was counting the number of empty cicada shells vegetation and other objects on our lawn and the neighbors' on both sides.  I tallied a little over 30 of them, and saw a few round holes in the soil where they recently burrowed out of the ground.
     A bit later that same evening at home, I saw a few chimney swifts careening across the overcast sky while chasing flying insects.  Meanwhile, a group of post-breeding robins were flitting in and out of the trees in our neighborhood while seeking refuge in them for the night.  I can could hear the robins chirping as they fluttered from tree to tree in their quest. 
     And when the swifts disappeared from the sky and the robins were finally settling down in a tree for the night, a few big brown bats and maybe a half dozen little brown bats (the former species is a bit larger than the other) fluttered and swooped over the neighborhood.  The seemed to drop out of the trees where they would have spent the day relaxing, camouflaged against the bark.  But now those several bats were flying erratically as they chased airborne insects across the sky, without collision with their fellows, or anything else.  For the several minutes I watched the aerial ballets of those bats, they were quite entertaining.  Then, as abruptly as they appeared, they were gone, having flown farther out to seek their flying insect prey.
     Anyone can have similar experiences with nature on their lawn.  Just get out and look, and have patience.