Not only is the lawn and impoundment landscaping at Greenfield Corporate Center outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania well done and beautiful the year around, it's also another human-made habitat to enjoy and study trees and birds through the year, including in winter. That extensive corporate lawn and seven ponds also show how more natural landscaping benefits certain kinds of adaptable birds and other creatures. Certainly the lawns and ponds at Greenfield are better for wildlife than the farmland it replaced. Fortunately, many companies today are putting in more natural plantings on their lawns, which is providing food and shelter to some critters. Those wild animals don't have to move out and lose homes; they take advantage of mitigated habitats and win themselves a home.
Some beauties of Greenfield are the foliage on planted red maples, sugar maples, Bradford pears and burning bushes late in November. Red maples and burning bushes have red leaves, sugar maples have orange ones and Bradford pear foliage becomes a glossy dark red and purple. But when those leaves fall off the trees, the beauty of coniferous trees planted at Greenfield becomes more visible as if a veil was dropped.
Many coniferous trees were planted at Greenfield, including white pines, Norway spruces, eastern hemlocks, Douglas firs and northern white cedars or arborvitae. Those evergreens make winters at Greenfield prettier and wilder-looking, especially when snow is piled on them and/or when they are silhouetted black against winter sunrises or sunsets. They are even attractive when standing dark and stalwart at dusk or in fog with snow on the ground.
These conifers, like all their kind everywhere, feed and shelter certain kinds of wildlife in winter. Permanent resident gray squirrels, Carolina chickadees and American goldfinches and wintering pine siskins, two kinds of crossbill birds and other kinds of resident or wintering birds eat seeds from the cones of conifers. Those creatures also consume conifer seeds that fell to the ground under the trees.
In winter, conifers offer shelter to mourning doves, dark-eyed juncos, American robins, red-tailed and Cooper's hawks, great horned, saw-whet and long-eared owls, and other kinds of birds. The heavily needled boughs of these trees block the cold wind, making the birds more comfortable when they are among them.
A variety of planted deciduous trees and shrubbery also provide beauty to people and food for a variety of wintering wildlife. Resident gray squirrels, blue jays and wintering American crows feed on acorns dropped by planted oak trees. One or two red-tailed hawks sail over Greenfield to watch for unwary squirrels to catch and eat.
The beautiful red or orange fruits of crab apple trees are eaten by flocks of American robins, cedar waxwings, starlings and other kinds of birds in winter. Some days those trees are swarming with a small variety of birds, which are sometimes preyed on by a Cooper's hawk.
A few of the seven impoundments at Greenfield attract adaptable, common waterbird species during winter, including thousands of Canada geese, scores of mallard ducks, and, at times, several ring-billed gulls. These birds rest on the water and/or ice in those ponds and fly about twice a day to farmland to get food.
The thousands of Canada geese leave the ponds each winter day. First they swim together and face into the wind before take-off, all the while becoming more restless and honking more and more insistently, as if getting up their nerve to take flight. Finally, flock after flock, in turn, takes off from the water, into the wind for better flight control, with a roar of rapidly-beating wings and even more excited bugling. After lift-off, the geese fly to nearby fields to eat waste corn kernels in harvested fields and the green shoots of grass and winter rye.
After a few hours, more or less, those same Canada geese returned to Greenfield's ponds, again creating an exciting, wild show of numbers and pageantry. Filling the sky with their bodies and noisy bugling, the geese approached the ponds of their choice, flock after flock, and parachuted down to them on the same aerial highway like feathered waterfalls. Sometimes airborne goose gatherings are silhouetted black against a sunset.
One time I saw a flock of Canada geese plucking grass on one of Greenfield's large lawns. Suddenly, they all took flight at once, with much honking, as if in panic. Looking around, I saw an adult bald eagle soaring low over Greenfield's impoundments, perhaps watching for fish.
Mallards are not as dramatic at lifting off the ponds as the Canadas. But group after group of them speed off the water, one right after another, until all are powering rapidly, on whistling wings, to feeding fields to shovel up waste corn.
Some winters, a great gang of noisy snow geese, that never pipe down, lands on the largest of Greenfield's ponds. In winter, these birds continually move around cropland in their search for harvested cornfields and winter rye fields. So these ever restless geese don't stay here long because they will roam off in search of more fields or begin their migration north to their breeding grounds on the Arctic tundra.
Sometimes one or two each of great blue herons and belted kingfishers winter around Greenfield's ponds, as long as they are ice-free, to catch fish. The herons wade in the shallows while the kingfishers watch for fish by perching on a tree limb by a pond or hovering into the wind over the water.
Greenfield Corporate Center is an example of wildlife adapting to human-made habitats. They win themselves a home and we can enjoy their beauties and intrigues.
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