Unexpected Migrants

     This afternoon, September 23, 2015, I was driving through farmland in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to do errands.  I approached a one-acre, short-grass pasture that was nearly a quarter flooded.  That spot had been flooded by local farmers in winter for ice skating.  But why was that spot inundated now, and how?  We have not had heavy or prolonged rain in a couple of weeks and no other meadows were flooded that had been in the past.  But at any rate, this cropland pasture was partly covered with a few inches of water which attracted three kinds of migrants, one of them particularly interesting to me.         
     Nine lesser yellowlegs, that do have yellow legs, and about five least sandpipers, all migrants, waded through the short grass and shallow water to eat invertebrates, refueling for the next part of their journey to South America to escape the northern hemisphere winter.  The brown, sparrow-sized least sandpipers walked in inch-deep water and pick invertebrates from the grass and water with their beaks.  The grayish yellowlegs, being larger and having longer legs and bills, repeatedly jabbed at invertebrates in deeper water, thus reducing competition for food with their smaller relatives.
     The yellowlegs nested in Canada and Alaska where the coniferous forests meet the treeless Arctic tundra, but the least sandpipers raised young on the tundra itself.  Both species, and several other kinds of sandpipers, migrate south through North America from mid-July into early October, the majority along the seacoast, but many others through the continent's interior.
     I see northbound sandpipers of several kinds on lake and stream shorelines, mud flats and flooded fields in Lancaster County every year in May.  And I see southbound sandpipers of those same species here during July, August and September.  So these sandpipers are not new locally, but they are still neat to see, considering where they came from.  And I had not seen many this summer or fall because of the lack of rain flooding fields and pastures, though I did see a few sandpipers on the shorelines of impoundments with lower water levels.
     But several twelve-spotted skimmer dragonflies were the main attraction in that flooded meadow during the half-hour I visited it.  Those dragonflies, true to their name, rapidly skimmed low over the water in pursuit of flying insects to eat.  They were attractive insects with two-inch bodies, three-inch wing spans and three dark spots on each wing.  Three spots on each of four wings per dragonfly gives this dashing creature its common name.  Each wing also had white spots between the dark ones.
     Twelve-spotted skimmers are migratory along the Atlantic Coast, and these dragonflies certainly may have been migrants.  They'll live in The South through winter, reproduce in ponds there, and their descendants, after pupating, will venture north in spring.     
     Migration is one of the ways wildlife copes with approaching winter to survive.  And certain kinds of birds and insects migrate annually. 
     Those migrant sandpipers and dragonflies were interesting to experience today.  One never knows what nature can be spotted until one gets outside.  Often nature is noticed and enjoyed when it is least expected.