Mill Creek Meadow Thickets

     Driving home to New Holland, Pennsylvania one sunny afternoon early in January, I stopped on a small bridge over Mill Creek a mile south of New Holland to absorb the beauty of an overgrown meadow planted with sycamore and river birch trees and red-twigged dogwood shrubs, all plants that do best in constantly moist soil.  Five pairs of handsome mallard ducks in a slow stretch of the small creek that was hemmed in on both sides by matted down reed canary-grass, plus river birch and young sycamore trees.  A northern mockingbird was eating a crab apple fruit in the tree while a group of lively American goldfinches were eating seeds from the seed cups of dead, but still standing, evening primrose plants.  And a red-tailed hawk was perched on a sycamore while watching for mice.  I had gone by that overgrown meadow, and others like it along Mill Creek south of New Holland many times, but this time I was particularly struck by how lovely, interesting and important these shrubby meadows are to wildlife.
     The upper reaches of Mill Creek are more like a stream.  They are home to killifish, black-nosed dace, minnows, bluegill sunfish and brown and brook trout.  Those fish attract a few wintering great blue herons and belted kingfishers, a couple of mink.  Wintering Wilson's snipe, which is a kind of inland sandpiper, poke their long beaks into mud under shallow water to pull out and ingest invertebrates.  And muskrats live in tunnels in the stream banks and eat grass and other vegetation they find along waterways.     
     Three former short-grass pastures, that are not used to graze cattle or horses anymore and easily seen from public roads, straddle Mill Creek.  They have been planted in recent years to a variety of bottomland trees and shrubs.  And there is a variety of volunteer plants in those former meadows as well, including an assortment of weeds, grasses, vines, multiflora rose bushes, red juniper trees, ash-leafed maple and silver maple trees, crack willow trees and black walnut trees. 
     In the course of a few days I visited each of those pastures, those farmland oases, of at least a few acres each, to again observe the plants and wildlife thriving in them.  Those thickets of vegetation provide shelter and food for many types of wildlife.
     All these planted meadows are carpeted with volunteer reed canary-grass, a kind of grass that does best in damp soil.  In winter that grass gets matted down by wind, rain and snow.  Meadow voles (mice) live in nests and tunnels under that matted grass.  And some of those voles get caught and eaten by red-tailed hawks, American kestrels, screech owls, great blue herons, mink and other predators through the year.
     A couple of those three overgrown pastures had been planted to cranberry viburnums that produce red berries.  But crab apple and red juniper trees, and red-twigged dogwood and multiflora rose shrubs spring up on their own.  All these plants grow berry-like fruits that, along with the viburnum berries, feed wintering birds and rodents through winter.  Some of those birds are flocks of American robins, eastern bluebirds, cedar waxwings and starlings and individual mockingbirds and northern cardinals.  Some of those berry-eating birds fall prey to Cooper's hawks.
     Groups of wintering seed-eating birds live in some of the thickets in those planted and abandoned pastures and consume the seeds of goldenrods, teasels and other weeds and grasses.  Some of those bird species are song sparrows, goldfinches, house finches, white-throated sparrows and dark-eyed juncos.         
     A few species of permanent resident, woodland birds, including Carolina wrens, Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, white-breasted nuthatches, downy woodpeckers and red-bellied woodpeckers live in these woody meadows.  Though originally residents of deciduous woods, these adaptable birds move into new patches of half-grown trees and woody shrubs where they can get their invertebrate and seed foods.    
     There are many tree and shrub-planted, abandoned and overgrown meadows like these in southeastern Pennsylvania.  And all of them are valuable to wildlife of several species and lovely and interesting to us the year around.