The day after a couple of days of light snow toward the end of January, 2015, I drove through farmland that was harvested to the ground a few miles south of New Holland, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. My goal, again, was to see how field birds and birds around seepages and trickles of clear, running water adapted to the three to four inches of snow on the ground.
As I drove slowly through that cropland for a couple of hours, I saw the usual field hawks of mid-winter, including an American kestrel on a roadside wire watching for field voles (a kind of mouse) and six red-tailed hawks that were looking for any kind of prey they could handle. Two of the red-tails were a mated pair.
I saw a few flocks each of rock pigeons and starlings on the snow in the fields as they poked their beaks under the snow to get corn kernels still on the ground. Both these species are from European farmland, but they adapted well to American cropland and are permanent residents in agricultural areas and cities in this country. I also saw a few mourning doves and several crows in the fields to eat whatever waste corn they could find. Doves and crows are native birds that have adapted to farmland to get food through the year.
But, as usual, many large flocks of northern horned larks were the dominate species of birds in those extensive fields. They are called horned because they have two black feather tufts on their heads that resemble horns. They have yellow faces highlighted by patterns of black. But being mostly brown and the size of sparrows, horned larks are not often noticed until snow covers the ground. Then they are more obvious because snow takes away their camouflage and the birds settle on roadsides to eat tiny stones, exposed by snow plows, that help grind the seeds in their stomachs.
Horned larks get seeds and bits of corn kernels from bare parts of the fields where wind blew the snow away. Those bare spots shift position at the whim of the wind, and grow larger as the snow gradually melts away. Flocks of larks fly in bounding flight low to the fields quite often in their search for seeds and bits of corn on the ground.
But the little seepages and trickles of clear, running water, some of them partly choked with water cress plants, and all of them free of ice and snow in winter in farmland meadows in Lancaster County are more interesting than the fields after a snowfall. Here wintering Wilson's snipe, which is a kind of inland sandpiper, poke their long beaks into mud under the shallow water after a variety of aquatic invertebrates. But snipe are almost impossible to see until they fly or otherwise move because they are beautifully brown, streaked with black markings that allow them to blend into their surroundings.
That day in late January, 2015, when I drove through farmland, I saw several snipe in those little, watercress-filled rivulets and a few species of small, camouflaged field birds as well. Those birds, including a couple of killdeer plovers, several American pipits and a few each of song sparrows and savannah sparrows were along those trickles to get invertebrates and seeds to eat, which they couldn't get because of the snow on the ground. These birds, too, are easily overlooked because they are small and mostly brown which camouflages them.
The little flocks of pipits, which are here for the winter from their Arctic tundra breeding grounds, were the most interesting of the small birds along seepages and trickles. They not only walked along the muddy, snow-free shores of the waters, but were light-in-weight enough to actually walk on top of the watercress in their constant search for invertebrates, something I had never seen them do before. They pumped their tails up and down as they walked, as pipits do, perhaps to mimic the action of small debris bobbing in the water along shorelines, which is a form of blending in.
It seemed that all those farmland birds had adapted well to the snow on the ground. And they were interesting for me to experience that day.
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