Farming That Benefits Wildlife

     Farmland in southeastern Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, is a tough habitat for many types of wildlife to cope with because of the human-made disturbances in it, such as plowing, discing, planting and harvesting.  But some species of wildlife have adapted to getting food because of various farming practices, including spreading livestock manure, dumping dead chickens, turkeys and other livestock on fields to be rid of them, plowing and harvesting grain.
     Several kinds of wildlife benefit from spreading manure on top of snow in winter.  Those animal droppings are full of corn kernels that were chewed into bits but not thoroughly digested by large livestock.  Resident horned larks, rock pigeons, mourning doves, mallard ducks, black ducks and Canada geese, wintering American crows, and migrant tundra swans, snow geese and pintail ducks are some of the birds that scratch into the manure at some time to eat corn particles when all other grain and seeds in the fields are covered with snow.  Sometimes, several species of those birds fly down to manure strips in fields at once, creating interesting sightings for bird watchers.
     Dead chickens, turkeys and other farm animals thrown into the fields in winter are food for resident turkey vultures, black vultures, coyotes and red foxes, and wintering American crows, red-tailed hawks and bald eagles.  The coyotes and foxes are active at night mostly and are not often seen in the wide open fields.  But the birds are diurnal and readily spotted feeding on dead animals in cropland.  One can see the vultures, crows and other scavenging birds circling and descending cautiously to the fields to feed on the dead critters, often creating quite a show in winter when agricultural areas seem particularly barren of wildlife.  Often there is competition and squabbling among the various bird species over the dead meat lying frozen in the fields.
     Several kinds of birds benefit from plowing and discing the fields in March and April.  I'm sure those birds associate plowing and discing with food.  Flocks of ring-billed gulls that wintered here and others of that species migrating north quickly drop to plowed farmland to eat earthworms and other invertebrates from the furrows.  The gulls flounce into the furrows right behind the plows before those soil critters can escape.  And while each gull is catching creatures and eating them on the spot, other gulls are dropping into the furrows right behind the plows, but in front of the birds already in those trenches.  Meanwhile, the gulls in the back of the furrows fly up and forward to again come down in the front of it, thus creating a pinwheel affect that is quite interesting and entertaining to watch in the cropland.
     Flocks of American crows, American robins and purple grackles, and individual killdeer plovers, also feed on innumerable invertebrates turned up by plows.  They walk about on the lumpy soil, picking up earthworms and other critters as they go.
     A couple of times I have seen an American kestrel on a roadside wire watching a field being plowed.  And each one of those little falcons, those peregrine relatives, zipped down to the field to grab and ingest earthworms.  I was astounded by each of those tiny, worm-eating raptors because kestrels can kill mice, grasshoppers and small birds and there they were consuming earthworms.
     When farmers harvest wheat and barley in summer and corn in fall with automatic harvest machinery, they are also providing a variety of birds and mammals that eat grain from the ground with abundant food.  Groups of resident mourning doves, rock pigeons and house sparrows, and nesting purple grackles and American crows flutter down to move over the harvested fields to eat grain that was missed by the harvesters.
     Meanwhile, field voles that live in roadside banks wander into the fields at night to feed on waste grain.  Those mice are vulnerable to the attacks of red foxes, coyotes and owls at night and red-tailed hawks and kestrels during the day.  All those wild critters are in food chains based on the mice and grain in harvested cropland.
     These are farming practices that enable certain kinds of adaptable wildlife to get food in abundance from an otherwise tough environment.  And those same creatures provide interest and entertainment to people who know what to look for in agricultural areas.