One evening several years ago, four recently fledged screech owls lined up on four posts of our front porch for a short time. Those young owls were cute and quite a sight while they were there. Though our lawn and the lawns adjoining ours are not wildlife sanctuaries, they have had their outstanding natural moments of adaptable creatures through the years we've lived in our present home in New Holland, Pennsylvania, making our lives there the more interesting.
Small birds, particularly house sparrows, have been visiting our bird feeders for the last several winters. Occasionally we see a Cooper's hawk or a sharp-shinned hawk waiting to ambush a bird, sometimes with success. I've seen a Cooper's scrambling on foot under bushes after sparrows and another one of those hawks another time dining on a house sparrow, as the little bird's feathers floated to the ground. And once I saw a sharpy feeding on a house sparrow on top of snow in a snow storm. The hawk ate all of the bird it could, as feathers drifted across the yard with the snow. And soon after that raptor finished its meal and flew away to hunt more prey, the few pathetic bones and feathers left behind were quickly buried in falling and drifting snow.
One March day a few years back, a great blue heron caught and ate all our goldfish from our one-hundred gallon, backyard, goldfish pond. One day the fish were there, the next they weren't. I didn't see the tragedy, but a neighbor did and told me about it. We now have a net over our pond to keep herons and other predators out.
A couple of times early in March, migrating American robins have stopped at a neighbor's female American holly tree to eat the red berries still on that tree. They were an attractive, interesting sight on that tree until all the berries were stripped off and consumed.
Every spring for a few years, a pair of mallard ducks visited our goldfish pond. That happened before we put a net over the pond. The ducks never ate the fish, but they seemed to have a good time splashing in our pond.
One spring a mallard hen laid a clutch of 12 eggs under a bush in our yard. I knew the day she laid the last egg and marked the day they would hatch: It takes 28 days of incubation until ducklings hatch. Sure enough, on the morning they were to hatch, the hen was looking around cautiously, I guess to see if their was no danger nearby. Suddenly she left her nest behind, trailed by a dozen newly-hatched, fuzzy ducklings in a line, apparently going to a nearby pond.
A couple of female cottontail rabbits have dropped litters in flower beds on our lawns. One rabbit nursery was under the same shrub where the duck cradle was, but in a different year. Another rabbit nest was in a flower bed against the house. There may have been other rabbit nurseries that I never saw, or some baby rabbits were caught and eaten by the few house cats we have loose in our neighborhood. But at any rate, the young rabbits we did see on our lawn were cute.
One morning in the middle of May, I was walking the dog and saw a mother opossum waddling across the street in front of our house with about six babies on her back. The dog wanted to attack her, but that didn't happen. When the female opossum got to our front yard, she slipped under a shrub and disappeared. Fortunately, she seemed to have gotten away because I didn't see her again.
Some winter evenings, I see a red-tailed hawk and/or a Cooper's hawk landing to spend the night in one or two of our tall Norway spruce trees in our back yard. They certainly bring a bit of the wild into our yard when they do that.
Occasionally at night, particularly in winter, I hear a pair of great horned owls calling to each other in our immediate neighborhood. They must raise young in a tall evergreen somewhere nearby. At any rate, their hooting is thrilling to hear.
Several kinds of birds nest on our lawn, including mourning doves, American robins, song sparrows, northern cardinals, blue jays, gray catbirds, Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, Carolina wrens and house wrens. The last four species are originally woodland birds that traditionally rear offspring in tree cavities, abandoned woodpecker holes and bird boxes erected for them, including in our yard. A couple of times, doves have laid their two white eggs in a clutch in flower pots on our front porch. And over the years, I have seen parents of all these species feeding their fledged young.
But the prize for the most unusual nest site in our immediate neighborhood has to go to a pair of Carolina wrens. They hatch a brood in a neighbor's outdoor cooking grill. Luckily, the time was in spring before the people intended to use that grill.
About six little brown bats seem to drop out of the trees in our area at dusk on warm evenings and zig-zag and swoop over our lawn and surrounding ones to catch insects in mid-air. They are always entertaining to watch until the twilight fades to darkness.
One summer we found a bumble bee nest with a few each of worker bees, larvae and honey pots in a field mouse nest under a bench sitting in a flower bed. We accidentally disturbed it and the bees eventually abandoned it.
Another summer we had a yellow jacket nest in our basement. Of course, nobody liked that. I suggested leaving them alone because in fall the female workers that sting would all die, and the queen would bury herself in the lawn for the winter to live until next spring when she would start a new colony elsewhere. And that is what happened.
There was a loose colony of female cicada killer wasps in a patch of bare soil in the next door neighbors' yard during another summer. We saw the cicada killers bringing back paralyzed annual cicadas through the air. Each wasp landed in front of her shallow burrow and dragged the cicada into it. Then each female wasp would lay an egg on each cicada that the wasp larva would eat until it pupated and changed to an adult wasp.
Like most lawns in Lancaster County, ours has a lot of fireflies flashing their cold lights each dusk in July. Male fireflies crawl up grass stems and take off into the air, flashing their lights all the while.
The males' lights encourage females in the grass to respond with their own dim glows so the males can see them to mate with them.
In summer, I find leaves on shrubbery on our lawn with quarter-inch, round holes cut out of them.
That is the work of leaf-cutter bees. Those bees cut out the leaf parts to line hollow stems where they lay several eggs. The stems and leaf parts protect the bee larvae as they feed on pellets of pollen and honey, pupate and emerge as adult leaf-cutter bees.
A couple of summers, I found what appeared to be moth or butterfly caterpillars on our red-twig dogwood bushes. But I could not identify those larvae until one day, by dumb luck, I saw in an identification book the larvae of a saw-fly wasp. They were the caterpillars I saw in the dogwoods. That mystery was solved.
Once in a while in September, migrant monarch butterflies pass through our yard as part of their exodus southwest to certain forests on mountains in Mexico to spend the winter. And a couple of times, several monarchs have spent a September night perched on our Norway spruce trees. But the next day they were gone, never to return.
Loose rivers of north-bound red admiral butterflies poured through this county for several days early in May one year, most of them swiftly and low to the ground, creating quite a spectacle that I had never seen before.. Females of that species soon laid eggs on stinging nettle plants which were full of red admiral larvae toward the end of May.
Some summers I plant parsley plants to attract female black swallowtail butterflies to lay eggs on them, which they usually do. I then watch their larvae ingesting parsley leaves, grow, pupate and emerge from their chrysalises as beautiful, adult butterflies ready to breed and lay another generation of eggs.
Most any neighborhood or lawn in the Mid-Atlantic States has an abundance of adaptable wildlife. We need only look for it, which will make our lives more enjoyable.
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