An Inspiring Nature Drive

     This beautiful afternoon, for about an hour, I drove out of my home town of New Holland, Pennsylvania to enjoy whatever nature I could experience.  The sky had no clouds and the air was cooler and drier than it had been for awhile; a wonderful day to be in nature.  I only went two and a half miles out of town- through farmland, over a stream, by a small farm pond and into a woodland.  But I saw a lot of nature.
     My first stop was beside a larger, deeper part of the stream with a slow current just off the road.  There I saw about a dozen foot-long fish swimming into the slow current.  Looking at them through the clear water with my 16 power binoculars, I saw they were white suckers.  I could see their down-turned mouths they use to get food off the bottoms of waterways and impoundments.  By feeding from the bottoms, they reduce competition with other fish species for food.
     The hot-pink flowers of ironweed on five-foot-tall, iron-hard stems beautified a meadow bordering the above-mentioned waterway.  Several butterflies of a few kinds flitted onto those blooms to sip nectar.    
     As I drove along slowly, I saw several tall cranberry viburnums already loaded with red berries that will be food for berry-eating birds this fall and winter.  And right at those viburnums, two ruby-throated hummingbirds zipped across the country road right in front of my car.
     A hundred yards down the road, I drove slowly by a red clover hay field loaded with pink red clover blooms.  Swarms of pale-yellow clouded sulphur butterflies fluttered among those pink blossoms and landed on them to sip nectar.  I also saw a few monarch butterflies among those red clover flowers.  These butterflies will be the parents of the generation of monarchs that will migrate to forests in Mexico to spend the northern winter.         
     Along the country road I was on, purple-top grass stood about three feet tall.  The seed tops of each plant glistened reddish-purple in the sunlight; very attractive.
     A quarter of a mile beyond the hay field, I drove by another, even smaller brook right along the road and shaded by a row of willow trees.  There male black-winged damselflies, with striking, metallic-green abdomens, seemed to dance in shafts of sunlight over the brook while trying to repel rivals of their kind from their sections of the little waterway.  There, too, I saw the many orange flowers of spotted jewelweeds, the tiny, pink ones of smartweeds, the folding, blue blooms of Asiatic dayflowers and a single cardinal flower plant with several striking, red blooms along the shores of that tiny brook.
     As I drove by a farm pond in a meadow, I noticed a stately great egret wading in shallow water in search of little fish, tadpoles, frogs and other small creatures.  The egret was white all over, with long, black legs and a lengthy, yellow beak.  And, being a member of the heron family, it also had a long neck to reach out to grab its prey in its bill.
     Although I only drove about five miles, round trip, for about an hour, I saw a lot of beautiful, intriguing and inspiring nature.  For an emotional lift most anytime of day, get out to observe nature.  Even the most commonplace plants and animals close to home can give us enjoyment and inspiration.