One day late in June of this year, I drove into the large parking lot of a church in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania on business and noticed about six killdeer plovers running and flying across the blacktop ahead of me. The church campus was composed mostly of that parking lot and even larger short-grass lawn, studded here and there with planted, young trees, good killdeer habitat, surrounded by fields and hedgerows. Still, I thought, that's a lot of killdeer in one place in this area at this time of year. Then I saw the probable answer; several raised, decorative islands of rocks in that parking lot, each island a little bigger than the size of a pickup truck.
Killdeer are adapted to hatching young on rocky ground where they and their eggs are camouflaged. And they adapted to catching invertebrates on soil with little or short vegetation. That human-made church campus is a good habitat for killdeer.
As I continued driving on that parking lot, I noticed other human-made habitats recently carved from farmland. There are two, quarter-acre retention basins filled with water and rimmed by tall cattails. About six pairs of red-winged blackbirds are nesting among the cattails of each basin. Each female red-wing attaches her grass nursery to a few cattails stems a couple feet above the water level. Red-wing parents, however, get much invertebrate food from the surrounding short-grass lawn and shuttle it to their young in hidden cradles among the cattails.
The rim of one of the cattail basins is lined with a variety of flowering plants, including Canada thistles, common milkweeds, chicory and daisy fleabane. The day I was there I saw an attractive pair of American goldfinches feeding on the seeds of the thistle plants that were already done blooming and developed seeds. And I saw worker bumble bees and one each of red admiral and question mark butterflies sipping nectar from thistle and milkweed blossoms. Soon, I suspect, female monarch butterflies will visit those milkweeds to lay eggs on their leaves, which is the only food of monarch caterpillars.
The other cattail basin had few flowers on its edge, but was loaded with green frogs, though it was recently built. Green frogs often travel overland on dewy nights or during rain and some discover new ponds to live in. I knew the frogs were there because many of the males were gulping and belching to entice females to them for spawning in the shallow water.
A stream, bordered by a thin strip of tall grass and other plants and dotted with young trees, flows slowly through one end of this campus. A dam on the stream slows its current for over a hundred yards, making it more like a pond. While there, I saw a family of mallard ducks on the water and a few families of Canada geese grazing on short grass on the lawn near the waterway. A great blue heron and a green-backed heron stalked frogs and fish in the shallows of the waterway. I thought perhaps the green heron and its mate had young in a stick nest in a tree in a nearby hedgerow. A pair of spotted sandpipers bobbed and danced along the stream's edge while searching for invertebrates. Those peculiar motions are a form of camouflage, resembling bits of debris bouncing in the wavelets on the shores of inland waterways and impoundments. Those spotties probably have a brood of young somewhere nearby. And I saw a few carp feeding in the slowest part of the stream, stirring mud from the bottom as they moved along.
Green darner dragonflies, white-tailed dragonflies and bluet damselflies sped and fluttered over the water and lawns after mates and flying insect prey. These insects are not harmful to people. In fact, they are entertaining and eat a lot of pesky insects, including mosquitoes.
I saw a couple pairs of rough-winged swallows, a pair of belted kingfishers and muskrat signs along the stream. These creatures dig burrows into the soft soil of stream banks where they live and raise young. The swallows catch flying insects, the kingfishers eat small fish and the muskrats consume a variety of vegetation along waterways, therefore there is no competition among these species for food.
A couple pairs of permanent resident song sparrows nest in shrubbery along the stream while a pair of eastern kingbirds hatched young in a twig and grass cradle in a tree by that same waterway flowing slowly through the lawn. The sparrows are like sandpipers in that they patrol the shallow water and mud flats along streams and ponds for a variety of invertebrates to eat. The kingbirds, however, being flycatchers, catch insects from the air.
A few each of barn swallows and tree swallows flew swiftly over lawns and the stream in hot pursuit of flying insects, while a giant snapping turtle lumbered across a lawn on her way to a place to dig a hole and lay eggs. I saw the snout of another snapper in the stream at the same time. The barn swallows nest in a nearby barn while the tree swallows rear offspring in the few bluebird boxes erected on the church campus.
There are many other campuses like this one, but of all different acreages. And if certain parts of each one was left alone, either on purpose or by human indifference, to develop plants naturally, they would be good places for wildlife to live and reproduce, increasing their populations. Every plant and wild animal on this campus is there because its needs are met there. I was fortunate and glad to have noticed the plants and animals I did on this campus, though the bulk of it is mowed and trimmed.
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