Natural Spectacles in Southeastern Pennsylvania

     There are several spectacular natural happenings in highly-developed southeastern Pennsylvania in a year's time.  Each one is so overwhelming that it is easily seen or heard by most anybody who is outdoors.  And each one is inspirational and enjoyable to most people who experience them.
     Colored leaves in October are the single most spectacular natural happening in Pennsylvania.  It's been said that this state has the best display of autumn foliage in the world.  The state still has a lot of forests and its latitude and climate are right for colored foliage.  The beauty and abundance of autumn leaves reaches a climax here during the last week in October, a time when they are unbelievably beautiful and abundant.  Then deciduous woods are almost completely yellow and red, like nowhere else on Earth.
     When the amount of daylight each day becomes shorter and the average temperatures are cooler, deciduous trees shut off water to their leaves, allowing their death.  The plants' sensing shorter daylight and cooler temperatures is miraculous.  As the leaves die, the green chlorophyll in them also dies.  Then the other colors in the foliage are visible to us and we say the leaves have turned colors.
     Some of the most striking and inspiring autumn leaves in southeastern Pennsylvania are red ones on black gums, red maples, staghorn sumacs and Virginia creepers, orange ones on sugar maples, and orange, red and yellow ones on sassafras, poison ivy and sweet gums.  These colored leaves brighten woods, hedgerows, and suburban areas with their many trees.
     North-bound migrations of snow geese, tundra swans and Canada geese in February and March are exciting and inspirational to those people who experience those large, magnificent birds, including here in southeastern Pennsylvania.  A few, comparatively small flocks of each of those waterfowl species may winter here, but the great, constantly noisy hordes of geese and swans suddenly coming into this part of Pennsylvania are overwhelming to those folks who experience them.  Masses of bugling or whistling waterfowl can be spotted almost anywhere in the air, and on certain local impoundments where they rest and fields where they feed on waste corn and rye sprouts.  These majestic birds stay in southeastern Pennsylvania a few weeks, feeding, gaining strength and waiting for spring to catch up to their restless urges to go north to raise young.  And then, again almost overnight, they're gone from here and pushing farther north.
     Hundreds of male spring peeper frogs peep shrilly and hundreds of male American toads trill musically in the shallows of ponds and wetlands each warm evening through much of April here in southeastern Pennsylvania.  The wonderful, ancient calling of these two tailless amphibians brings their respective genders together for spawning, and are one of the first true signs of spring's arrival.  Being cold-blooded, these little creatures can not call in cold weather.  But when they are heard singing during warm evenings and nights in April, many a human soul experiences joy. 
     Soon after sunset each evening in July in southeastern Pennsylvania, innumerable male fireflies climb up stems of grass and other plants, take to the air and fly slowly while regularly flashing their cold, silent abdominal lights.  These fireflies, which really are beetles, create enchanted summer evenings with their millions and millions of charming blinking lights in woods, fields and lawns.  The beauty and intrigue of those lights are practically everywhere in abundance during the peak of the fireflies' breeding season in mid-July.
     The purpose of the male fireflies' flashing beacons is to get a glow of response from the flightless females still in the vegetation below.  When each male spots the glow of a female, he drops to her in the vegetation and they mate.   
     The ear-splitting, timeless chants of male true katydids overwhelm deciduous forests throughout Pennsylvania, at dusk and through much of each night from the end of July through to heavy frosts in October.  Each male has a file on one wing and a scraper on the other, which, when rubbed together, create the raspy, but charming,"Katy-did" sound.  Thousands of male katydids fiddling together in a woodland create a beautiful, wonderful chorus of chants.  Their seemingly endless chanting brings the genders of katydids together for mating before frost kills them.
     The lovely flowers of alfalfa and red clover in hay fields sometimes attract swarms of butterflies in late summer and through autumn.  Those attractive insects visit the blooms to sip nectar, and flying from blossom to blossom, create a shimmering show of many butterfly wings.  The most numerous butterflies in hay fields are cabbage whites, yellow sulphurs, monarchs, tiger swallowtails, silver-spotted skippers, buckeyes and spicebush swallowtails.  
     In spite of much human activity in southeastern Pennsylvania, there still is a lot of inspiring nature to experience here each year.  And it's that way throughout much of the world.  We only need to get out to experience some of natures' beauties and intrigues.