For a few hours on the morning of September 21, 2016, I visited various spots in the wooded Welsh Mountains, which are near New Holland, Pennsylvania, to enjoy nature. The Welsh Mountains are filled with homes, fields and roads, and yet some woods are intact and have much nature in them.
I no sooner drove into Welsh Mountain woods when I spotted five stately wild turkey Toms strolling along a soil road between a woodland and a field. They were picking up seeds, grasshoppers and other tidbits as they walked. I have seen wild turkeys in those wooded hills before over the years, but never five magnificent Toms in one group.
I stopped for close to an hour at a community park of a few acres on a hilltop to watch for migrating broad-winged hawks passing over on their way to northern South America for the winter. While in the park, I noticed about 40 American robins and two northern flickers in the short-grass lawn. The robins were eating earthworms and other invertebrates they could catch. The mostly brown flickers were probing into the soil after ants in their underground colonies. Flickers are woodpeckers, but instead of being black and white like their relatives, they are brown, which camouflages them on the ground as they feed. And while in this park, I saw a few turkey vultures and two resident red-tailed hawks sail over it. And I saw three migrant broad-wings and one sharp-shinned hawk soar over and heading southwest.
Moving on again, I came to a house and barn in the Welsh Mountains where several black vultures have roosted in the past. And, sure enough, almost a dozen of them were perched on the house roof, the barn roof and in trees around those buildings. Those scavenging vultures, like turkey vultures, are clean and a bit regal, whether in trees or soaring high in the sky.
Permanent resident blue jays and red-bellied woodpeckers seemed to be common in the woods everywhere I went that day. I could see and hear them almost constantly. Some jays also were busily flying in and out of a small grove of planted pin oak trees as they harvested acorns and buried them in soil or in crevices in trees.
I saw a few kinds of flowering plants blooming commonly along the roads in Welsh Mountain woods, including goldenrods, Jerusalem artichokes and evening primrose with yellow blossoms and spotted jewelweeds that have orange ones. I saw two different ruby-throated hummingbirds, in two patches of jewelweeds, dipping their beaks into jewelweed flowers to sip nectar and eat whatever little insects were in them as well. And I saw a few beautiful, orange and black monarch butterflies, either on goldenrod blooms or migrating southwest to Mexico for the winter.
Some colored leaves on certain plant species helped beautify the woods that day. There were some red leaves on black gum, red maple and sumac trees and red ones on Virginia creeper vines. I saw orange foliage on sassafras trees and poison ivy vines and some yellow leaves on tulip trees, black walnut trees and spicebushes. All that autumn foliage made the woods bright and cheery.
And I saw several kinds of birds eating the off-white berries of a poison ivy vine and the small, dark fruits of a Virginia creeper vine. Those vines grew up neighboring trees so I could see both of them at once and some of the birds were eating both kinds of berries. A few permanent resident blue jays and a single each of red-bellied woodpecker, downy woodpecker and Carolina chickadee were consuming berries while I was there. A few summering American robins and gray catbirds and a single northern flicker also ate some of those fruits of the vines. And one each of migrating rose-breasted grosbeak, eastern phoebe, Swainson's thrush and yellow-rumped warbler were ingesting those fruits, too.
For a woodland that has been compromised by human activities, there is a lot of nature to be experienced in the Welsh Mountains at times. And September 21 was a good day to explore the natural world close to home.
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