Lovely Natural Scenes

     Twice in the past week I have been to natural places that were small in the numbers of wildlife, but big in their beauty, as if paintings of nature.  I visited each site for only a couple of hours, but came away enriched with their beauties, in spite of their both being filled with human activities.
     The first spot was seen on October 1, 2015, from a pavilion in Washington Boro, a little town along the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  I was in the pavilion because a steady rain was falling.
     This part of the river, among wooded, alluvial islands, is shallow, with some mud flats and a few half-submerged, fallen trees protruding from the water.  A majestic, adult female bald eagle perched handsomely on a log in the river that, from my viewpoint, was beautifully, centrally framed by crack willows, staghorn sumacs and other kinds of trees that were beginning to have warmly-colored foliage.  A dozen, or more, migrant tree swallows zipped back and forth across the sky and over the eagle at tree top level as they caught flying insects.  Those swallows were at the top of the painting.   
     A lesser yellowlegs, which is a kind of long-legged sandpiper, waded in the shallows near the eagle to snare invertebrates from the water and mud, while a black duck swam by the yellowlegs.  .And eight double-crested cormorants rested on another dead tree lying in the shallow water, within the framework of trees.  But after a little while, they began fishing again. 
     Bald eagles and cormorants are all catchers of fish, but do so in different ways.  Bald eagles drop from the air to snare large fish in the talons of their feet.  Cormorants dive under water from the surface to catch fish smaller than the eagles take.
     The other picture of natural beauty I enjoyed was at Blue Marsh Lake State Park near Reading, Pennsylvania on October 8, 2015.  The day was sunny, but cool, with many puffy-white, cumulus clouds in a blue sky.  I was among young red juniper, black walnut, white ash, red maple and silver maple trees in a small picnic area cleared of shrubbery and vines.  But that patch of open woods was surrounded by thickets of bushes, vines and young trees on two sides.  A gravelly shore six feet deep was in front of me, just off the woods, as was the large impoundment that reflected the blue sky.  And because I was on the edge of trees, much of the sky was visible to me.  Woods, that had some colored leaves, lined the shores a quarter mile across the lake, adding greatly to this beautiful natural scene.  The scene reminded me of Thoreau's cottage in the woods or a Native American camp by a lake in a woodland.  Motor boats speeding on the lake were the only thing that marred the peace of this place.
     The central focus of this painting by a lake was a great blue heron flying powerfully and swiftly low over the water as it chased two other great blues away from its stretch of shoreline where it hunts fish in the shallows, and two spotted sandpipers dancing along the shore in their searches for invertebrates to eat.  Great blues stand nearly five feet tall and I saw a couple of these large herons wading out from a distant gravelly shore to snare fish.  Spotties dance and bob along shorelines to mimic debris bouncing in the water, which is a kind of blending in to be invisible.  I also saw a belted kingfisher fly through my imagined frame of young trees and three ring-billed gulls floating on the lake.  Kingfishers dive beak-first into the water to catch small fish.  Those gulls are the first of the thousands that will roost on a distant shore of this lake through winter.
     I saw several turkey vultures and a red-tailed hawk occasionally soaring in the upper frame called the sky.  They were particularly easy to see before the cumulus clouds.  Several American crows also traversed the sky now and again and a couple of them harassed the airborne red-tail.
     I saw a blue jay, a yellow-rumped warbler and a downy woodpecker in the nearby thickets that framed my observation post on two sides.  The yellow-rump was catching flying insects in mid-air while the downy chipped into a small, dead tree after invertebrates.
     Several black and yellow bumble bees visited tiny, white aster flowers on the edges of the thickets to sip nectar and pollen from them.  The golden nectar "baskets" on the back legs of the bees were neat to see.  And Chinese stink bugs were everywhere, flying about in the woods and thickets.            
     These two areas were beautiful when I visited them, as if they were beautiful paintings done by a skillful artist.  And, actually, they were!  I could again see the Hand of God everywhere I looked.