March Meadows

     Short-grass cow pastures in southeastern Pennsylvania are much like lawns.  They have no cover for vertebrate creatures, but are a banquet table to muskrats and a small variety of birds, particularly in March.
     Those meadows are grazed mostly by cattle and horses.  The cattle provide milk and meat, the reason the pastures exist.  Many of those meadows have a stream or creek flowing through them, and some pastures are dotted with trees and/or shrubbery.
     Flocks of certain kinds of permanent resident or wintering birds get food in some meadows in winter, as long as the ground is snow-free.  Canada geese eat the grass itself.  House sparrows hop across pastures to consume seeds.  Starlings, killdeer plovers and American pipits walk over the grass to catch invertebrates among the grasses; starlings poke their beaks down to the grassroots level to get food.  Eastern bluebirds perch on twigs or fences to watch for flying insects on milder winter days.  Bluebirds and starlings eat berries when insects are not available to them to eat.
     As periods of daylight get longer each succeeding day from early January to the start of March and snow melts, a variety of migrating birds suddenly join the resident and wintering birds in local pastures during the beginning of March.  Now American wigeon ducks and great masses of snow geese join Canada geese on some impoundments to rest, and certain meadows to graze on grass.  Now, too, mallard ducks, northern pintail ducks, green-winged teal ducks and well-camouflaged and strikingly beautiful Wilson's snipe gather around puddles of rain and snow melt in meadows.  The ducks swim in the shallows of those pools to ingest vegetation they dredge out of the mud with their shovel-like bills.  The snipe are inland sandpipers, some of which patrolled the edges of meadow brooks for invertebrates through winter in this part of Pennsylvania.  In March, the locally wintering snipe also wade in inches-deep water in partly-flooded meadows to poke their long beaks into the mud under the water to pull out invertebrates.  And now some snipe are moving north a little and settling around pools in local pastures.                 
     Mixed hordes of purple grackles, brown-headed cowbirds and male red-winged blackbirds pour like rivers into this area early in March.  Those massive floods of blackbirds spread across fields, lawns and meadows to feed on seeds, grain and invertebrates.  But soon they are in the air again to look for new feeding grounds, inundating each one with their tremendous numbers.  When in flight, blackbird flocks block out the background scenery, and one can see thousands of red shoulder patches of male red-wings flickering like red-hot coals in a black furnace of coal.  And all the while, one can hear their unending, vocal squeaking and wing-flapping.  But soon those great gatherings disperse as pairs of birds seek nesting places to rear young, grackles mostly in coniferous trees and red-wings in cattail marshes for the most part.   
     Migrant ring-billed gulls and American robins also populate fields, lawns and cow pastures with their numbers early in March when they search for earthworms and other invertebrates to fuel themselves to continue their passages.  Like the other avian March migrants, ring-bills and robins constantly move from place to place in their quest for food. 
     Gulls are pre-adapted to getting food on fields and meadows because of their evolving on beaches and salt marshes.  But robins, a kind of thrush, developed as a species in shrubby clearings in eastern deciduous woodlands.  Obviously, the robins made the greater, recent adjustment to open, human-made habitats, such as pastures. 
     All these meadow birds are interesting and exciting to see during their March migrations north to breeding grounds.  It's not too late to get out to see some of these birds passing through and settling on pastures to feed, where they sometimes make great spectacles of themselves.