Potpouri Nature

     After doing a few errands in the morning of September 30, 2016, I drove around Lancaster County, Pennsylvania a little to experience what was happening in nature.  While crossing a bridge over the Conestoga River, I saw an immature double-crested cormorant standing on a half-submerged log in that small river.  I never saw a cormorant on the Conestoga before, but those fish-catching birds are adaptable and moving around at this time, so they could be on any larger body of water.
     Inspired by the cormorant, I decided to stop at a few familiar places along Mill Creek on the way home.  At the first stop along Mill Creek, I immediately saw an immature bald eagle perched on a limb of a dead tree along that exclusively Lancaster County waterway.  This eagle may have been raised in a nearby bald eagle nest along Mill Creek.  But at any rate, it probably was watching the creek for carp, bluegill sunfish and other kinds of larger fish to catch and eat.
     On that same stretch of Mill Creek I saw an adult mute swan that has lived there for at least a few years and an apparent migrant pied-billed grebe.  Both birds floated on the water like miniature boats.  Eventually, the swan pushed upstream and out of sight like a tiny paddle boat.  The duck-like grebe repeatedly dove under water in its search for smaller fish.  At times it was hidden under tree limbs that had fallen from the shore into the creek.
     While I watched the grebe, a fisherman approached that same tangle of branches hanging over the water and accidentally flushed a score of beautiful wood ducks.  They were young of the year and adult woodies of both genders.  The frightened woodies rushed off the water, up and away in seconds, amid alarmed voices and a hurried beating of wings.
     Those post-breeding wood ducks had gathered prior to their flight into The Deep South for the winter.  And any day now they will be off to The South, not to return here until March of next year.
     A few species of birds were busily concerned about food along the shores of this same part of Mill Creek.  I saw a couple of blue jays carrying pin oak acorns in their beaks to either bury them in the ground, or stash them in a crevice behind loose bark or in a tree cavity.  In winter, they will collect some of those acorns and eat them.  Pin oaks, incidentally, are trees of bottomlands where the soil is generally moist. 
     Three gray catbirds and a handful of American robins were happily consuming the small, red fruits of a crab apple tree on a bank of Mill Creek.  The catbirds will go farther south sometime in October, but the robins might stay here all winter, if the fruit and berry supplies hold out through that harshest of seasons.
     I drove to another section of Mill Creek to experience what was happening.  On the way I saw several clumps of eight-foot tall Jerusalem artichoke plants, each one with several beautiful, yellow blossoms.  This kind of sunflower was cultivated by Native Americans in this area who ate the tubers.
     And on the way to another part of Mill Creek, I saw the yellow blooms of butter-and-eggs, the pale-pink blossoms of bouncing bet and the hot-pink flowers of a kind of smartweed growing here and there along the banks of the country roads I was on.  Only the smartweeds are native to North America, while the other plant species are native to Europe.  Butter-and-eggs are in the snapdragon family and have flowers shaped like those on snapdragons to prove it.  The crushed leaves of bouncing bet can be made into a lathery soap.  Bouncing bet came from the name of a well-endowed, medieval, European washer woman.
     I saw two great blue herons and one great egret, all of them tall and statuesque, and wading in Mill Creek to watch for fish.  The egret will soon drift south again for the winter, but the great blues might stay north, if they continue to find open water from which they can snare fish.
     I saw several great lobelia plants along Mill Creek, all of them sporting lovely, dark-blue flowers.  They reminded me of the dark-blue bottle gentian blooms I saw in a local woodland only days before.      A flock of two dozen gray and white rock pigeons circled and swooped across the sky in unison and finally landed in a recently harvested corn field to feed on corn kernels left on the ground.  Wild pigeons are handsome birds that live and nest in barns and under bridges and eat grain and seeds from cropland fields.  They were brought to North America by Europeans for meat and eggs, but some escaped and their descendants are now wild birds on this continent, as throughout much of the world.  And we continue to provide these adaptable birds with food and shelter the year around through our farming activities.
     And, just before I reached home, I came across a flooded field from recent heavy rains.  I stopped to check for shorebirds on the muddy edges of the quarter-acre puddle in that field of corn stubble left from recent harvesting.  I saw several killdeer plovers, a few least sandpipers migrating south from their breeding territories on the Arctic tundra, and a flock of over a hundred local starlings around that temporary pool.  All of them were looking for invertebrates that emerged from the soil to escape the water.  Killdeer and sandpipers are shorebirds, but starlings are not.  But starlings are very adaptable and take advantage of many feeding situations that make them successful and abundant throughout much of the world.  They are a real success story.
     All this I noticed in a couple hour's time without even trying close to home.  Readers can do the same near their homes.  Just get out and look for the beauties and intrigues of nature.