Skunk Cabbage and Red-wings

     Readers who know about nature would think that skunk cabbage and red-winged blackbirds should not be lumped together as fellow inhabitants of certain habitats.  Skunk cabbage is a large plant that traditionally grows in patches of itself on the wet or moist, shaded floors of bottom land woods.  And red-winged blackbirds nest in stands of cattails, phragmites and reed canary-grass in the bottom lands of open, sunny meadows.  And yet, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in North America, skunk cabbage and red-wings are common associates.  How can that be?
     In the days of American Indians in this county, skunk cabbage grew in shaded, damp floors of bottom land forests.  But many of those forests were cut down by European colonists to create farmland, including pastures with small waterways where cows and horses could graze on grass and drink.  Though the shade from the tree canopy was removed, the soil was still moist to wet and the skunk cabbage roots in the cut-away woods adjusted to the increase in sunlight and survived where they always had been, but now in a sunny meadow.
     Meanwhile, and over time, seeds and runners of cattails, phragmites and canary-grass, that always have been adapted to sunlight, moved into those open habitats and thrived among the original skunk cabbages still there and growing every spring and summer.  Red-winged blackbirds are attracted to stands of those tall, reedy, or grass, plants to nest.
     Each female red-wing builds a grass nursery on a few to several stems of each of those plants, a foot or more above the damp soil or inches-deep water.  There she lays her eggs, and feeds her young, along with her mate.
     So that is why today skunk cabbage and red-wings live in the same, human-made habitats.  Our works have changed other environments, causing changes in the habitats and habits of other kinds of critters as well.