I sometimes visit a back corner of a cow pasture about a mile south of New Holland, Pennsylvania where water from a food processing plant is discharged into a small tributary of Mill Creek. Today, September 29, I stopped at that meadow of short grass for about two hours to see what life forms were evident. There was plenty because of the time of year. Insects are most evident now, birds are migrating, plant growth has reached its climax and many plants are still blooming with multitudes of beautiful flowers. So even this meadow, that is grazed by cattle and has little protective vegetation in it, was interesting to visit because of the abundance of plants and small creatures that have adapted to it and were visible to me. I enjoy the challenge of finding adaptable life in habitats that have been degraded by human activities to experience what life forms survived what we have done.
The dominant flowers in that meadow today were lots yellow ones on bur-marigolds that have gone past their peak of blooming in a couple of damp ditches. And there were many white or pale-lavender aster blossoms, depending on the species, in a ditch and scattered around the meadow. Those beautiful, little aster flowers were swarming with a variety of insects, some in abundance.
There were many cabbage white, yellow sulphur and pearl crescent butterflies fluttering incessantly among the aster blooms to sip nectar. Cabbage whites and yellow sulphurs are the most common kinds of butterflies in this area all summer and into autumn. Pearl crescents are abundant among asters because their larvae eat aster plants and pupate in the ground among them. When adult pearl crescents emerge, the innumerable aster flowers are readily available to them.
Other insects on the aster blossoms to get nectar were buckeye butterflies, bumble bees, yellow jackets and some kind of wasp. Buckeyes have several fake "eyes" on all four wings that scare off would-be predators.
Several other kinds of flowering plants were still blooming in this meadow, including red clover and smartweeds with pink blossoms, knotweeds, chicory that have blue flowers and lots of corydalis with small, yellow blooms. The smartweeds and knotweeds just began blooming, but the other species have been flowering since summer.
There were other plants of interest in this pasture. Arrowhead plants emerged from the shallow water of the brook's edges. Japanese hops vines sprawled across the ground here and there. A couple of bur cucumber vines ran along the railing of a small bridge over the tributary. A few cockle bur plants grew in the damp soil and had several thorny seed pods that will stick on animal fur, which will scatter the seeds inside when the animals pull the burs from their fur. And I saw a few orange fuzzy caterpillars eating the short grass they were on along the brook. Those caterpillars will pupate to a type of moth.
The small, shallow brook also had life in it, which to me indicates that the food processing plant in New Holland cleans its waste water before discharging it into this brook that immediately flows into Mill Creek. Mixed schools of banded killifish and black-nosed dace live in the discharge. Several bluet damselflies and a few of some kind of red damselfly were spawning eggs on mats of algae in the back waters of the brook. Some of those eggs will be food for the schools of minnows.
Several kinds of birds were in this meadow. A couple of killdeer plovers trotted about in the short grass while looking for invertebrates to eat. Two least sandpipers, which are about the size of sparrows, walked over mud flats on the tributary's shores to get invertebrates. Those sandpipers had nested on the Arctic tundra and are now migrating south to escape the northern winter.
One large tree in the pasture and two small, half-dead ones sheltered a few species of birds, including a pair of eastern bluebirds, a group of house finches, an American goldfinch, a song sparrow, two northern flickers and an immature eastern phoebe, which is a kind of flycatcher. The phoebe was a migrant that stopped in the meadow to rest and catch flying insects before continuing south. Phoebes rear young on flat surfaces under protective boulders or roofs near streams in deciduous woods so this youngster was out of his normal habitat.
Two large birds visited this pasture. One was a young great blue heron that was catching grasshoppers in the grass and among the bur-marigolds and asters. The other was an immature bald eagle that soared low overhead as it watched for muskrats, ducks and larger fish to eat.
This meadow looks like it would not harbor much life. But it does, in abundance. But it is all adaptable, common species of plants and wildlife, particularly small critters that can make use of the limited vegetation in this pasture. And there are many other places scattered around the world that are like this one.
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