Entertaining Meadow Wildlife

     I visited a short-grass meadow with a stream flowing through it for about an hour on April 28, 2016 to experience whatever beauties of nature I could.  This meadow is in a once-forested bottomland with constantly damp to wet soil.  But the woodland was long ago cleared to create the cow pasture, and the farmland that surrounds it.  All the plants and wild animals in this meadow were either introduced by people or adapted to human-made habitats. 
     I know a forest was here originally because of the patches of skunk cabbage plants in the pasture.  Skunk cabbage can tolerate shade and flourishes on wet forest floors.  But when the trees were removed to make the meadow, the skunk cabbage adapted to lots of direct sunlight and continued to thrive.
     Meanwhile, cattails and sedges that prefer ample sunlight took root among the skunk cabbage plants in this human-created pasture.  And so today skunk cabbage, cattails, sedges and a few trees all flourish among each other in an interesting plant community in the wetter parts of this short-grass meadow, the background for the entertaining and abundant species of birds I saw in it today.
     Several each of tree swallows and barn swallows were real entertainers in that pasture today.  Swallows of both kinds continually weaved and swooped among each other in mid-air, careening swiftly low to the ground and stream, without collision.  They were catching small, flying insects that are too small for us to see at any distance.  And both species were beautifully stream-lined and feathered, the tree swallows with metallic-blue upper parts and white under parts and the barn swallows being purple above and light orange below. 
     The barn swallows will nest in neighboring barns and some of the tree swallows will rear offspring in tree cavities and bird boxes erected in the meadow and nearby farmland for them.  But there were so many tree swallows that I thought many of them are migrants that stopped at a hot spot of insects for lunch.
     Both male and female red-winged blackbirds were among or near the cattail stands.  Some of the males were perched on last year's dead cattail stems to regularly sing "kong-ga-ree" while raising their black wings to show off their red shoulder patches, which attracts females to them for mating.  But the females and some of the males were feeding on invertebrates they found among the short grasses of the pasture.
     Male red-wings are black all over, except for those red shoulders, each one lined with a stripe of yellow.  Female red-wings are brown with darker streaks all over their plumage, feathering that camouflages them around their nest and young.   Each female red-wing will weave a grass nursery among a few neighboring cattail stems, a few feet above the ground as a precaution against flooding.  Young red-wings, when leaving their grass cradle, look like their mothers.
     Many American robins ran and stopped, ran and stopped over the short-grass meadow as they do over regularly mowed lawns in their searches for earthworms and other invertebrates.  I am amazed at how many robins are in this county at all seasons recently.  They seem to be almost everywhere, including on lawns, pastures and some fields.
     Robins are members of the woodland thrush family, but this species probably nested traditionally in small trees in forest clearings and edges, rather than in the deep forests.  Today robins hatch young in younger trees and shrubbery, including those near this meadow.    
     I enjoyed watching the lively birds gathering food and claiming nesting sites in this meadow close to home.  It was an inspiring experience.