When Swallows Gather

     I was driving through cropland between New Holland and Ephrata in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania for about 40 minutes on the afternoon of July 21, 2015.  Blue flowers on tall chicory plants and flat clusters of white blooms on equally high Queen-Anne's-lace dominated the country roadsides with their omnipresent abundance.  And along one rural road, scores of tree swallows and barn swallows were lined up on roadside wires or flying over nearby fields to catch flying insects.  Tree swallows have white bellies and barn swallows have pale-orange ones.
     Those swallows are done raising broods of young for this year and are just now beginning to gather into flocks prior to their drifting south to avoid the northern winter.  They do this every year, starting at this time, so their presence in Lancaster County farmland was no surprise to me.  In fact, where there are scores of migrant swallows  now, there will soon be hundreds, then thousands through the rest of July, August and September, all of them consuming flying insects as they drift south and presenting intriguing and inspiring aerial shows for anyone who watches for them.
     And on that afternoon drive in July, as I do every year at this time and through August and September, I saw other kinds of creatures adapted to cropland, in abundance.  Cabbage white and yellow sulpher butterflies fluttered in abundance, and beautifully, among the lovely, pink flowers in red clover fields and the purple blooms of alfalfa fields.  They were sipping nectar from those beautiful blossoms before those fields get cut for hay to feed cattle and horses in barns through the coming winter.  
     And I saw flocks of rock pigeons, mourning doves and house sparrows in harvested grain fields, feeding on grain missed by harvesting machinery and lying among the beige stubble on the ground.  The pigeons and sparrows (really weaver finches) are originally from Europe, while the doves are native to North America.  The pigeons and doves are in the same family of birds and have several characteristics in common.  But all these grain-eating birds are adapted to living and nesting among farm buildings and getting their food in nearby croplands.  Farmland, it seems, is made just for them.  
     All these species of adaptable and obvious critters, and several other kinds, are adapted to local agricultural areas and make them more interesting. Watch for these farmland animals that make a ride through the countryside more enjoyable.