Late-Spring Woods

     For a few hours on May third of this year, I visited a wooded valley in forested hills in northern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  The beginning of May is a magical time in the woods of this area as spring gives way to the green look and the warm, humid feel of summer.  The dead-leaf-carpeted woodland floor was green with the large leaves of innumerable skunk cabbage plants in the lower, damper places and the foliage of May apples, wild gingers and garlic mustard on the rest of the woods floor.  Clumps of May apple leaves looked like the umbrellas of groups of elves standing on forest floors. 
     The shrub layer of those bottomland woods was green with the foliage of spice bushes, and of multiflora rose bushes in little clearings in the woodlands.  And the forest canopy was starting to get green as the leaves grew from using the sugary sap the trees made last summer and stored in their root systems through winter. 
     I saw several vegetative beauties in this lush, green wooded valley.  Red maple trees were decorated with red seeds that will soon break loose from their twig moorings and spin away on the wind.  Several large sycamore trees with their mottled bark lined the creek flowing through this wooded valley.  I noted big, tulip trees, white oaks, red oaks, American beeches with their smooth bark, and sugar maples in this woodland.  The unfurling leaves of cinnamon ferns looked like green fiddleheads.  Fallen logs and boulders were carpeted with moss after a few days of showers.  Dogwood trees had white flowers.  May apples, rue anemones and garlic mustard also had white blossoms on the forest floor.  And patches of golden ragwort plants had golden blooms on eighteen inch stems while blue violet flowers peeped from under fallen leaves and forest floor plants.       
     There was a mix of small birds in this lush, green valley.  I saw and heard permanent resident tufted titmice, Carolina chickadees and red-bellied woodpeckers.  Beautiful white-throated sparrows and white-crowned sparrows were still in thickets where they wintered, but were getting ready to migrate north and west from here to nest.  And I heard and/or saw several gray catbirds, and at least one each of blue-gray gnatcatcher, wood thrush, veery, which is a kind of thrush, Baltimore oriole, Louisiana waterthrush and swamp sparrow, all indicators of the climax of spring in this area.  All these charming, little birds probably will nest in this wooded valley, the waterthrush and swamp sparrow along the creek. 
     I also saw two female rose-breasted grosbeaks snapping off twigs, presumably to make nests in the trees in this wooded valley.  The one grosbeak followed the other one through the bushes as she worked to get twigs as if the follower was a nest-building apprentice.  No doubt these grosbeaks will nest in this lovely, wooded valley. 
     There was a variety of several warblers in the tree tops, apparently eating small insects.  But they were hard to identify against the glare of the sky, and because they are hardly ever still for long.  I knew they were warblers by their size and actions.  And I was able to identify a few yellow-rumped warblers, a common yellow-throat, a yellow warbler and a blackburnian warbler.  The yellow-throat and yellow warblers probably will raise young in the thickets of this wooded valley, but the others will migrate north to evergreen forests in Canada.      
     That wooded valley on May third was a mix of green leaves, beautiful flowers and interesting woodland birds, as it is every year at this time.  It is a lovely paradise of peaceful nature on the edge of an overly developed county.