A Busy Meadow

     In the early afternoon of August 8, 2016, I was driving through Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland in search of anything new or interesting in nature.  I came to a patch of tall peppermint plants in bloom about 30 yards off the country road I was on.  I stopped at that sunny meadow to see what insects were visiting the mint blooms to ingest nectar, pollinating those blossoms in the process.  I mostly saw cabbage white and pearl crescent butterflies, silver-spotted skippers, carpenter bees and digger wasps on them.   
     Digger wasps are about an inch long and black with rusty-red abdomens.  Adult diggers consume nectar from flowers but their larvae feed on the larvae of June beetles living in the soil.  Female diggers tunnel through the ground after June beetle grubs, sting them to paralyze them and lay an egg on each grub.  Each wasp larvae eats its beetle larva, overwinters in the pupa stage and emerges the next summer ready to ingest nectar and mate.
     While I was watching the insects on the mint flowers, I noticed the mints weren't alone in their stand.  I also saw the orange blossoms of spotted jewelweeds and the small, pink blooms of smartweeds.  All those plants develop best in damp ground and these were growing in a shallow ditch in the pasture. 
     I also began to notice the meadow in general.  A brook, and two lines of trees and shrubbery, each one about 100 yards long, broke up the continuity of the pasture.  I saw, too, that this was a busy meadow of birds and bugs.  I stayed to watch that human-made pasture for about an hour and a half.
     Dozens of post-breeding barn swallows zoomed through the air close to the meadow after flying insects.  They were done nesting in local barns and were preparing to drift south to avoid the northern winter by developing wing muscle strength and gaining weight.
     Over a score of starlings and brown-headed cowbirds followed a few grazing horses as they grazed in the meadow.  The horses stirred up insects with their hooves as they stepped, making those bugs noticeable to the birds.
     I saw that the short-grass meadow I was studying had patches of patriotic flowers.  There were pink flowers on red clovers, white blooms on Queen-Anne's-lace and some blue blossoms on chicory.  All those plants, however, are originally from Europe.  But a few yellow and black male goldfinches, which are native to North America, didn't care about that.  They were on chicory plants to eat seeds that developed on the already pollinated flowers.  
     I also noticed a killdeer plover picking up invertebrates from the pasture.  Killdeer are inland shorebirds that nest on nearly bare ground and gravelly parts of meadows and fields across North America.
     And I saw a wood chuck moving about slowly and nibbling vegetation in the meadow by one of the lines of trees and shrubs.  Chucks live in holes in the ground they dig themselves.  Abandoned chuck holes are used by red foxes, coyotes, skunks and other mammals.
     The clear, flowing brook figured heavily in the variety of animal life in that pasture.  Schools of stream-lined black-nosed dace swam easily into the current of that narrow waterway as they watched for tiny invertebrates to eat.  A few striking, male black-winged damselflies that have metallic-green bodies courted females along the brook.  Their fluttering flights low over the sparkling water seemed like dancing in the sunlight.  They were once predatory nymphs in that brook and females will lay eggs in that same waterway.  And a pair of big green darner dragonflies were attached to each other as the female of the species dipped the end of her abdomen in slower-moving water to deposit eggs.
Predatory dragonfly nymphs will develop from that spawning.
     A few kinds of small birds, including several beautiful American goldfinches of both genders, a few house finches of both genders, a family of chipping sparrows, a striking pair of indigo buntings and several house sparrows entered a slow, shallow section of the brook to drink and bathe.  Sometimes there were several birds of a few species flutter-bathing at once, creating an attractive and interesting show.  I thought the blue of the male indigo was particularly lovely. 
     A few kinds of common butterflies, including cabbage whites, and the beautiful tiger swallowtails and spicebush swallowtails were "puddling" in mud on a bare-soil path made by the horses going to the brook to drink.  The butterflies were ingesting moist soil and, probably, horse urine to consume minerals they can't get from flowers.
     One or two each of northern cardinals, song sparrows and gray catbirds flitted among the trees and other plants in the two hedgerows, adding to the diversity of life in that meadow.  They had already nested in those lines of trees and bushes and were gaining weight and regaining strength for the coming fall and winter.  The catbirds will migrate south for the winter, but the cardinals and sparrows will live out their lives in those hedgerows where they hatched.  This winter they will eat weed seeds and spend cold, winter nights huddled in the shrubbery.
     Though created and used for the good of people, that meadow, like other human-made habitats, has an interesting diversity of adaptable life in it.  A key to survival is to be adaptable and make use of what is available.  In the meantime, we humans can enjoy experiencing plants and animals that have adapted to human-made habitats.