Preps for Winter

     A gathering of yellow-rumber warblers fluttered and flashed everywhere among deciduous trees and shrubbery in a peninsula of woodland jutting from the equally wooded Welsh Mountains into Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland.  Those warblers were catching insects in the plants' foliage and from the air.  And each one had an obvious yellow rump and a yellow blotch on each flank. 
     I saw several kinds of birds and mammals in that woodland for about and hour and a half on a beautiful day in mid-October.  The mammals, including a gray squirrel, eastern chipmunk, cottontail rabbit and four buck white-tailed deer were, of course, permanent residents in that woods.  And some of the birds were residents of them, too, including a couple of female northern cardinals, a white-breasted nuthatch, two downy woodpeckers, a couple of Carolina chickadees and a blue jay.
     And there also were several kinds of recent migrants in that woodlot that afternoon.  They included the yellow-rumps, an eastern phoebe, two female eastern bluebirds and a few white-throated sparrows.
     But whether these critters were residents of that woods or not, many of them were active in  preparing for winter, creating much entertainment for me.  The jay and squirrel were storing nuts for use in winter when food may be scarce.  The jay was gathering acorns and flying off with them to store them in a tree cavity or a hole it poked in soft soil for each nut with its sturdy beak.  The squirrel specialized in black walnuts.  They are the only critters that can.  Squirrels are big enough and have teeth large and strong enough to chew through the outer husk and the inner shell to consume the nutrition within. 
     The chippie was a real worker.  While I was there he, or she, constantly ran, flat to the soil and among grass and fallen leaves, back and forth between his little den in the ground and the various food sources, such as acorns, grass seeds, berries and other, similar vegetation.  He'd fill his cheek pouches with food, run back to his burrow, empty his cheeks in an underground storage chamber and pop right out for another load.
     A downy woodpecker was chipping at dead wood on a limb to make a cavity for its winter home almost the whole time I was there.  Chips of wood dropped from its construction site.  Good thing woodpeckers have sharp bills and reinforced skulls of bone.  
     The nuthatch walked up-side-down on a large black walnut trunk and limb as it inspected crevices in the bark for invertebrates and their eggs.  Nuthatches feed in this way the year around and they are the only birds able to look for food in that way.
     The bluebirds, yellow-rumps, white-throats and phoebe already did much of their preparation for the coming winter by migrating as far as they did.  The phoebe probably will go farther south, but the other species may well stay in that woodlot all winter, as long as they can find berries and seeds to eat.   
     That peninsula of woods was full of interesting birds and mammals during the short time I visited it.  And many of those creatures were busily getting ready for winter while I watched them, making my time in the woods the more intriguing.