Streambank Homes

     Late this morning, as I was driving home through Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland after a couple of errands, I crossed a clear stream and noticed a muskrat swimming in it.  I stopped the car by that waterway and watched the muskrat exit the water and walk up a streambank to a meadow of short grass.  There it pulled up grass with its teeth, then waddled back down to the stream with a wad of short grass in its mouth and swam upstream for several yards.  Then that rodent with a beautiful fur coat dove under water and swam into a hole in the streambank at the water level.  The muskrat made a few more trips of that nature while I watched.  Perhaps it was a pregnant female making a nest in her den for her future babies.
     The stream the muskrat lives in flows through a short-grass cow pasture, studded with large willow and silver maple trees.  The day has been cold and windy, but clear with ample sunshine.
     As I waited for the muskrat to show herself, and while watching her, I saw a small variety of wintering birds around that waterway.  A pair of eastern bluebirds were flitting among twigs in one of the willows, while a small group of American goldfinches fed on weed seeds on a south-facing streambank along the waterway.  Meanwhile, a little group of American pipits walked about on the short grass meadow, back a few yards from the waterway, in their search for tiny invertebrates among the grass roots to eat.  The bluebirds and goldfinches might be local birds, but the pipits are down from the Arctic tundra for the winter.
     And while watching the muskrat, I was happy to notice a red-tailed hawk soaring majestically on high.  That diurnal raptor probably was watching for mice, squirrels or any other creatures it could attempt to capture for a meal.  And a bit later, from the same spot by the waterway, I was thrilled to see a magnificent adult bald eagle soaring low over the surrounding cropland, possibly in search of carrion to ingest.  Sometimes, several bald eagles winter in Lancaster County farmland to feed on dead livestock deposited on the fields.
     I also saw a great blue heron, about a hundred yards back the stream, wading in the water to catch fish.  And I noted a male belted kingfisher flying from tree limb to tree limb along the waterway.  Kingfishers, too, catch fish by diving into the water from a tree branch or hovering into the wind.
     As I watched the muskrat and kingfisher along the stream, I thought about how these species live and raise young in burrows they dig themselves in streambanks.  Muskrats excavate burrow entrances at the usual water level, then tunnel up to a living chamber just under the grassroots level.  These rodents, therefore, exit their tunnels in relative safety underwater and their living sections are far above the water line so the owners don't drown during floods.
     Muskrat burrows are generally safe from most predators, but mink, which are semi-aquatic weasels, get into some muskrat dens, kill and eat the resident or residents and use the 'rats' homes for themselves.  Some female mink even raise young in muskrat burrows.
     Kingfisher pairs dig burrows near the top of streambanks, tunneling straight back a few feet to a nesting chamber.  Their each pair rears several offspring on fish and other aquatic critters they catch in waterways and impoundments. 
     Pairs of rough-winged swallows use some abandoned kingfisher holes to raise their own youngsters.  They feed their offspring on a diet of insects they catch in mid-air.
     Muskrats and kingfishers live and raise young in tunnels they dig into streambanks.  Those burrows are relatively safe to the creatures that created and use them, species that demonstrate how most every niche on Earth is occupied by some form of life.        

Wintering Brookside Birds

     After a snowfall of a few inches to several inches on the ground in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland, as elsewhere, a few kinds of small, wintering birds go to flowing, tinkling brooks, rivulets and seepages in open, sunny cow pastures to find food.  The clear, running water keeps the narrow edges of those tiny, tumbling waterways free of ice and snow, allowing those little birds access to aquatic invertebrates in the mud and shallows of those shorelines.
     Wilson's snipe, killdeer plovers, American pipits and song sparrows are the unrelated species of little birds most likely to frequent the muddy borders of brooks, rivulets and seepages after a snowfall to acquire invertebrates to eat.  All these birds are brown on top, which blends them into their winter habitats of bare ground and mud, making them difficult to spot, especially when they are still.
     Wilson's snipe winter exclusively along those tiny waterways.  They are a kind of inland sandpiper that uses its long beak to probe the mud under inch-deep water to capture invertebrates.  And while these handsome, dark-streaked shorebirds poke their bills rapidly up and down in the mud, their whole bodies do a bobbing dance.  That dance may be a kind of camouflage in that it resembles objects floating and bouncing in the current of the waterways this sandpiper frequents to feed.
     Snipe rest between feeding forays among tufts of grass on the shores of the tiny waterways they winter along.  There they find respite from cold winds and predators such as merlins and peregrines.
     Little groups and singles of killdeer plovers and American pipits roam wind-swept, bare fields, or nearly so, in search of invertebrates to consume.  But when snow piles on the fields, burying their food, these species quickly go to shallow waters in pastures to find invertebrates.  But because they have short beaks, they get their food from the surfaces of ice-free mud and slow water, thus reducing competition with snipe for invertebrates.
     The robin-sized killdeer are brown on top and white below, with two black bars across their chests.  They trot short distances across bare ground, stopping here and there to pick up an edible tidbit.  Pipits are sparrow-sized, with two white outer tail feathers that are visible when they fly. Pipits pump their tails up and down when they walk along, which, again, may be a form of camouflage along flowing water.  Pipits, by the way, raise young on the wide open Arctic tundra.
     Song sparrows are permanent resident birds wherever they are.  They do not migrate.  This gray-brown and dark-streaked species shelters in thickets of bushes and tall weeds and grasses where they also feed on seeds of those plants.  And they shelter in thickets along little waterways.  There they run and hop across the mud and in inch-deep water to catch and eat invertebrates, as do the above-mentioned birds, adding still more beauty and interest to those tiny waters in sunny meadows.
     When the snow melts in the fields and their soil is exposed again, the killdeer and pipits go back to feeding on invertebrates in those fields, which to the birds must be an ever-expanding buffet.  But the snipe and song sparrows stay along brooks, trickles and seepages to find invertebrates.
     All four of these species of small birds made the percolating, crystalline waters in sunny meadows more interesting and enjoyable for awhile.  And the birds got food.  Beauty and interest are where you find them.           

Small Tundra Birds Wintering on Cropland

     The extensive cropland of eastern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in winter is usually silent, except for the whining of the bitter wind in one's ears and the occasional raucous cawing of crows.  And racing along with the wind, writhing sheets of snow hiss dryly over the fields and drift into ever-changing sculptures.  Here and there green shoots of living winter rye and beige, dead corn stubble poke above the snow.  But few trees and even less hedgerows break the continuity of the featureless shelterless fields.
     The agricultural practices that scour Lancaster County farmland clean of tall vegetation, or any plants, must remind a few species of small, Arctic tundra birds, this far south in search of food sources for the winter, of the tundra they left behind.  With a snow cover on it, that cropland must look particularly like the tundra to those migrant birds.  And because these small, feathered ambassadors from the far north, including horned larks, Lapland longspurs and snow buntings are adapted to extensive, wide-open spaces, many of them winter on Lancaster County's human-made croplands, bringing a bit of the tundra with them.
     These species of birds are camouflaged on wind-swept fields of bare ground or low vegetation, which make them virtually invisible to predatory hawks, and us, until those birds take flight.  If we watch and wait in farmland that was harvested to the ground in autumn, we'll see groups of these little birds sweep up in quick, erratic flight, the larks lisping quietly and the snow buntings buzzing harshly and flashing large, white wing patches that make them resemble big snow flakes tossed about in the wind.  Soon their wild, swift circling flight ends when the birds slide down into the wind and bound low to the ground on alternately beating and gliding wings.  Abruptly they drop to the ground and immediately disappear among the snowdrifts and clods of soil exposed by the wind.      
     Each of these tundra species wintering here are either in pure flocks of their own or in mixed groups.  Sometimes all four of the kinds of birds mentioned above are in the same flock, flying and feeding together.  And all these species, except pipits, feed on weed and grass seeds and bits of corn lying in the fields.  And all these species, except pipits, scratch through manure cast on top of the snow to get bits of chewed, but undigested, corn when seeds and corn kernels are buried in snow.
    Horned larks are, by far, the most common of these small birds wintering on Lancaster County's extensive farmland.  Many pairs of this kind nest on Lancaster County fields, which is risky for them because of the plowing and discing that can ruin clutches of eggs in their teacup-sized, soil nurseries dug by the birds themselves into the ground.  The lark pairs keep trying from early spring into summer, until they get a brood fledged.
     By autumn, many more horned larks come south, seeking food for the winter, thousands of which settle in Lancaster County.  These migrants greatly bolster the numbers of their permanent resident relatives here.           
     Attractive birds in a plain way, horned larks are brown on top, which blends them into their surroundings.  They have two black feather tufts on top of their heads, hence their name, and black bibs.  But the rest of their face is yellow.
     A few sparrow-like Lapland longspurs winter in flocks of horned larks, but not in groups of their own.  This species is brown with streaking, has white outer tail feathers, and males each have a faded black bib. 
     Snow buntings are brown and white, which blends them into snowy fields.  They sometimes mix with horned larks, but generally are in flocks of their own.  However, buntings are not this far south every winter, but are here erratically.    
     These seemingly insignificant bird species add much interest and beauty to extensive, wind-swept fields in winter, a habitat they are well adapted to.  But they are most easily seen after a snowfall when they are drawn to rural roads to eat tiny bits of stone that grind the seeds in their stomachs.   
    

Adaptable, Inland Ring-bills

     The leisurely, direct and powerful flight of ring-billed gulls is poetry.  Their graceful soaring on high on long, supple, swept-back wings is a natural masterpiece of elegance.  Tipping this way and that on black-tipped wings to make mid-air turns, whirls of many ring-bills search for winds and thermals that will carry them higher and higher with perfect ease and grace.  And adaptable as they are beautiful in flight, ring-bills are lovely, interesting additions to inland, human-made habitats, including land fills, blacktop parking lots, bare-ground fields and extensive lawns, where they get much of their food through each winter.  Those gulls are pre-adapted to those built, open habitats because they evolved on coastal beaches, mud flats and salt marshes.  And because of their adjustments to human-made environments and activities, they have increased their numbers greatly in recent years.
     Hundreds of thousands of ring-billed gulls winter in the Middle Atlantic States because of the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers, the upper Chesapeake Bay and several inland, human-made impoundments, including the Octoraro Lake, Struble Lake and Blue Marsh Lake, where they roost overnight on water, or ice, and mid-river boulders.  And every winter morning, long, straggly lines, "V" formations and scattered bunches of ring-bills leave those waters and power gracefully across the sky to feeding areas, particularly landfills these days. 
     Blizzards of swirling white and pale-gray ring-bills settle on landfills in the Mid-Atlantic States to consume edible garbage, along with swarms of starlings, scores of vultures of two kinds and flocks of American crows.  The gulls are so sure of their ability to take flight when necessary and used to the big trucks bringing in garbage, that they swarm in flight all around those huge vehicles as they dump garbage in the landfills.      
     The adaptable ring-billed gulls have other sources of food through each winter.  They plunk down on blacktop parking lots to ingest French fries, bread crumbs and other edibles thrown out by careless humans.  And they eat earthworms and other invertebrates off bare-ground fields, extensive lawns and country, blacktop roads, particularly after heavy or prolonged rains. 
     In November and March, when local soil is likely to be soft enough for plowing, many ring-bills associate that plowing with food and drop to the fields to ingest it.  They land in furrows behind the forward-moving plow blades to grab and consume exposed earthworms and other invertebrates.  Amid much flapping and calling, flocks of ring-bills form "pinwheels" of themselves as gulls in the back of the trenches fly forward, over their fellows in the furrows and drop into the ditches right behind the blades.  Those bustling crowds of ring-bills, frantically competing for a limited food supply, make interesting, natural spectacles in our local fields.           
     Before impoundments freeze, ring-bills catch small fish from their surfaces.  But when those still waters become glazed with ice, those gulls concentrate over turbulent waters that rushed down through turbines in hydroelectric dams on the Susquehanna to catch small fish that went through those turbines and welled up in the turbulence below each dam, either dead, injured or dazed, and easy pickings for the gulls.  Great clouds of ring-bills swirl back and forth low over the agitated water, without collision with their feathered fellows, as each bird watches for vulnerable fish to grab in its beak and eat.     
     Some ring-billed gulls are pirates at times.  They try to steal fish from common merganser ducks, pied-billed grebes and other diving, fish-eating birds that surface to swallow their catches.
     Ring-bills, like many kinds of gulls, scavenge dead fish when that food is available on the water's surfaces and along shorelines.  It's this looking for a variety of foods in a diversity of habitats that helps make ring-bills successful and abundant.  Adapting is a key to success.
     Ring-billed gulls are a large part of the Middle Atlantic States' wintering avifauna in open, human-made habitats because of the gulls' being preadapted to them.  They are beautiful in flight, and highly successful in using built habitats, making them an abundant, intriguing species here in the Mid-Atlantic States.          

Two Beautiful Spruces

     Red spruces and blue spruces are planted on lawns in southeastern Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, because they are attractive trees the year around.  They both are forever green, which especially adds beauty to winter landscapes, including lawns, and have handsome, pyramidal shapes and lovely, rustic cones that hang from twigs and enhance their beauties.
     Both these spruce species are native to North America.  Red spruces evolved in northern New England and extreme southeastern Canada, the Adirondack Mountains and here and there in the Appalachian Mountains south to western North Carolina.  Along with Fraser firs, red spruces are THEE coniferous trees on certain peaks of the Smoky Mountains, even forming almost pure stands of themselves here and there.  Blue spruces are native to parts of the Rocky Mountain region.
     Red spruces are not commonly planted on lawns, but are part of many suburban areas in southeastern Pennsylvania.  They have small cones that help to identify this type of spruce.  They are a fairly common, wild spruce in the Pocono Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania.  This species is shade tolerant when young, which helps it get established in the understories of bottomland forests where they are adapted.
     Blue spruces are commonly planted on lawns because of the attractive silvery or pale-blue sheen on their young needles of the season.  That is an unusual color among spruces in North America, which helps make this a popular species for planting.  Older needles are green, which gives blue spruces a two-tone appearance through much of each year.        
     Blue spruce trees have other beauties as well.  Young cones are bright red among the silvery-green needles of new growth, offering a lovely contrast of colors.  And their mature, dead cones are light-beige, giving these evergreen trees more diversity of color.
     Early in May in this area, the buds of new needles open on both species of conifers and the needles grow rapidly at the tip of every twig, offering yet another beauty to those evergreens.
     When the cones of coniferous trees, both wild and planted, mature and die, the scales on each cone opens, which allows the winged seed under each scale the freedom to fall out of the cone and twirl away in the wind to the ground, usually some distance from the parent tree.  Most seeds, however, are eaten by seed-eating, wintering birds, including two kinds of chickadees, two types of nuthatches, American goldfinches, pine siskins and other species.  A variety of rodents, including mice and squirrels, eat a share of the seeds as well.  Some birds and squirrels pick the seeds out of the cones while they are still attached to the trees.  But mice, and many of the other species, eat conifer seeds off the ground where they came to rest.
     Red spruces and blue spruces, like all spruces and firs, protect wildlife from cold winds and predators in winter and provide protective nurseries for certain kinds of birds to raise young in.  Great horned owls perch in them by day throughout the year to rest.  Red-tailed hawks, Cooper's hawks, mourning doves and American robins are some of the bird species that rest in them overnight through the year. 
     And all the bird species mentioned above, and others, raise young in these spruces and other kinds of conifers, in the wild and on lawns.  Conifers are not only attractive to us, but benefit many kinds of wildlife as well.     
     Red spruces and blue spruces are planted on lawns for their many beauties.  And those same conifers benefit certain kinds of adaptable birds and mammals as well.  They provide wining situations on many lawns.

Layers of Wintering Birds

     While watching a few species of birds along the edge of a bottomland woodlot in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania for an hour one afternoon early in December, I thought about how different kinds of birds occupy a specific layer or more of woodland, though there is some overlap among the various bird species.  The few types of birds I saw that afternoon were examples of various species using different levels of a deciduous woods.
     A permanent resident song sparrow and a wintering winter wren were each along a stream at the edge of the woodland I was enjoying.  Though these common species winter in different habitats, there was enough woods there to satisfy the wren and enough weedy edges to please the sparrow.  Therefore, these two adaptable species were wintering in the same place, though it is unusual for these kinds of birds to live in the same environment. 
     However, the song sparrow and winter wren have traits in common.  Both kinds are brown, which camouflages them in their common habitat of mud flats and gravel bars along small, flowing waterways.  Both species feed on invertebrates through winter, though the sparrow also eats seeds.  And the wren holes up for the night among tree roots at the waters' edge, while the sparrow nestles deeply in clumps of tall grasses and weeds.
     I saw a resident male northern cardinal and a little, scattered group of wintering white-throated sparrows low in thickets of red-twigged dogwoods, spicebushes, burning bushes, and tall weeds and grasses in the south-facing, sunny edge of the woods near the waterway.  These small birds were moving around and scratching up weed and grass seeds under the protective shrubbery.  That cover will be handy if a hawk or cat stalks those busily feeding birds.
     That afternoon, too, I saw a northern mockingbird, a few eastern bluebirds and a handful of cedar waxwings feeding on poison ivy berries on a vine halfway up a large tree.  Devout berry eaters in winter, those little birds were attractive in the sunlight as they consumed those dirty-white berries.  Probably full of berries, the mocker dove into a nearby shrub and stayed there to rest and digest in relative safety.  And, within several minutes, the bluebirds and waxwings simply drifted away to safe places to rest and digest the berries they ingested.
     A lone Carolina chickadee fluttered among buds, twigs and small limbs in the sapling layer of the woods as it looked for tiny invertebrates and their eggs in crevices.  Chickadees, titmice and other kinds of small, woodland birds can be spotted in a few levels of a woods, but usually not in treetops in winter because they are vulnerable to cold wind.
     I also noticed a northern flicker, which is a kind of woodpecker, and a red-bellied woodpecker in the treetops where they usually are.  Both these handsome species were chipping with their sturdy beaks at loose bark and dead wood on limbs to dig out invertebrates living in those branches.
     And I saw a turkey vulture and a pair of red-tailed hawks sailing over the treetops of that woodlot.  The vulture was looking for carrion to eat while the red-tails were watching for gray squirrels to catch and ingest.  These two kinds of soaring birds usually perch in the tops of trees when at rest.
     To think of various kinds of birds occupying different layers of woodland is musing to some degree, but based a little on fact.  Each species of life has its own niche, and each niche has its own level in a woods, lake or a lawn.  Creatures living at different layers face reduced competition for food and shelter because each and every level in every environment is utilized.            

Enjoying Water Birds

     Driving by a six-acre, human-made impoundment near Morgantown, Pennsylvania on December 8, 2017, I thought to stop and check the lake for water birds.  I stopped at that lake three days ago and saw one stately great blue heron stalking fish in the shallows near a shoreline.  But wintering birds shift around a lot and I wanted to see if any birds were on the lake on December 8, as they have at times in winters past.
     About 20 handsome Canada geese floated and rested in the middle of the impoundment.  A ten-foot wall of beige and seed-plumed phragmites along one shoreline offered an appropriate and impressive backdrop to the lake and the geese on it.
     Scanning the impoundment with binoculars, I saw up to 20 ring-necked ducks, mostly the elegant drakes, sitting on the water's surface near the geese.  Those ring-necks were hard to count because of their constant diving for food and re-surfacing, but interesting to watch diving under water from the surface to get aquatic vegetation off the lake's bottom to ingest.  Perhaps the suddenly colder weather pushed these bay ducks into moving farther south.  Or, maybe, they were merely somewhere else in the local area.  
     Three pied-billed grebes floated on the water near to the ring-necks and geese.  All three of them also dove occasionally under water from the surface to snare small fish in their beaks as they swam under water.  They came to the surface to swallow their victims.  Pied-bills have been on this lake every winter for at least the last few years.  These grebes might be the same ones that have been here before.
     A couple dozen pretty, over-wintering mallard ducks swam among and in front of the wall of emergent phragmites along the back shore.  Many mallards tipped-up, with their tails pointing toward the sky, to use their broad bills to shovel water plants, some of their food sources, off the bottom of the shallows.  A pair of striking black ducks, a pair of pretty wood ducks and a half-dozen attractive gadwall ducks swam among the mallards and fed much like them.
     As I watched the ring-necks, and the mallards and their puddle duck associates, another eight gadwalls swooped in for a landing on the water near their relatives already on the impoundment.  Those gadwalls in flight were striking to see.  They were streamlined, dark against the gray sky and had a white square on each wing that was extended in flight.  Those highly visible, white patches might hold the gadwalls together in a flock when in flight.
     Seeing the mallards and their associates and the ring-necks on the lake reminded me that mallards are the most common puddle duck in southeastern Pennsylvania and ring-necks are the most common bay ducks inland.  The presence of those two species on that pond was more appropriate to me than exciting.      
     Two majestic great blue herons slowly stalked fish in the shallows along the edges of the impoundment, one of them in and out of a stand of cattails growing out of the water.  Those herons offered another element of beauty and interest to the imopoundment.
     And there was a half dozen ring-billed gulls sitting on an edge of the lake.  They offered a bit of the ocean and estuary shore to that inland environment.  Other times in the past, a lot of gulls had rested on that impoundment between feeding forays in nearby fields and land fills.
     I was happy to watch that human-made impoundment for an hour.  Though I didn't see any outstanding birds or other creatures, I had a joyful, inspiring time along its shores.  We all can have peace and joy just by being immersed in nature, most anywhere, most anytime.      

Feathered Crossroads

     I went to a pond in Morgantown, Pennsylvania on December 5, 2017 to see flocks of wintering ring-billed gulls, Canada geese and a small variety of duck species, as I have in the last few years.  The weather was overcast, cool and damp, with a threat of rain.
     I arrived at that pond about 3:00 PM, but saw no gulls, geese or any other kinds of birds on it.  I thought that the gulls and geese were feeding away from that pond and would return to it at any time.  But as I waited for them to come back to rest on the pond, I saw flocks of gulls and geese passing each other over a woodland a few hundred yards away from the pond, but not landing on that impoundment as they had in the past.
     At 3:15 PM, I drove to a gravel pull-off near the woods the ring-billed gulls and Canada geese were passing over and waited for both species to come by my waiting spot.  And they soon did, flock after flock!  Long, scattered streams of ring-bills flowed silently by in such numbers that I can only say they went by my ground-level lookout by the thousands.  They all came from a nearby landfill where they consumed edible garbage all day and were now flying steadily southeast, flock after straggly flock to a lake, possibly Struble Lake, where they have rested each winter night for several years.
     Meanwhile, smaller lines and V's of boisterously honking Canada geese, one group after another every few minutes and totaling about 380 geese, powered northwest, crossing over, under and through the rivers of gulls as the geese flew, making exciting, inspiring spectacles of both airborne species for several minutes in the darkening sky.  Those geese probably had just left a harvested corn field where they filled up on waste corn kernels and probably were heading to a lake northwest of Morgantown where they would rest and digest until hungry again.
     Geese run into the wind, over water and soil, while flapping their powerful wings, to get lift to take off in flight, amid much loud, exciting honking as if to bolster the courage of each other for take off.  And all birds land into the wind for better flight control.
     The adaptable ring-billed gulls and Canada geese are two of many species of life that flourish in human-made habitats in the midst of human activities.  The ability of gulls and geese, for example, to do that increases their numbers greatly because they are not only not pushed out by human activities, but actually take advantage of them to suit themselves.  The gulls eating garbage in landfills and the geese ingesting grass from lawns and grain from fields boosts their numbers greatly because each species suffers minimal die-off during the harshness of winter.  More birds of each kind survives winter.  And great flocks of each kind rest on human-made impoundments between feeding forays.
     The gray sky and dark woods quickly got darker the cloudy afternoon of December 5 and by 4:30 I left for home.  But I wondered which impoundment those gulls and geese were coming down on to rest.  I had my guesses, but I would like to know if I was right.  If I was right about where the geese put down, I would not be able to get near that lake to know.  But I could go to Struble Lake, which lies a few miles southeast of Morgantown.
     I arrived at Struble Lake at 3:15 PM on December 7 and was immediately greeted by sprinkles of ring-billed gulls dropping to that lake.  Soon an almost steady river of gulls came from the northwest, which is the direction of Morgantown.  The gulls left the landfill, flew over Morgantown and a long, low, line of wooded hills, and into a broad farmland valley that cradles Struble Lake.  Floods of gulls poured over the lake, and each gull of thousands floated and spiraled down, down in front of a brilliant, cloud-studded sunset to a landing on that large impoundment.  A line of gulls formed on the water's surface that became about 300 yards or more long by the time the gulls pretty much stopped coming to the lake.   Again, I left for home about 4:30 PM.  I was right about the gulls at Morgantown's landfill spending each winter night on Struble Lake.
     This is just one of innumerable adventures anyone can have in nature anywhere the year around.  One has only to get out and look for those wonderful, inspiring adventures.      
          

Little Birds on Small Shorelines

     For about 45 minutes one sunny afternoon early in December of this year, I drove slowly along a rural road by a small creek about a mile from my home in New Holland, Pennsylvania.  I was out to see what wildlife was active in the short amount of time I had for that venture.  I soon saw a small bird fluttering in a thin thicket of red-twigged dogwood bushes, young ash-leafed maple trees loaded with winged seeds, and tall grass along that waterway.  I stopped and waited for the bird to emerge from the shrubbery so I could identify it with 16 power binoculars. 
     The bird was a lovely male house finch, along with a few others of its kind in that thicket.  And as I briefly watched the finches, a male cardinal and a song sparrow flashed into view among the dogwoods.  All those small birds, and other attractive species, had shelter from cold wind and predators among the bushes, saplings and tall grass, and found seeds to eat among the grasses and weeds in that streamside thicket.
     Driving on at a crawl, I stopped at another patch of tall grass and weeds standing right down to the slow-running water, and under a few each of medium-sized ash-leafed maple, silver maple and black walnut trees on those same banks.  A dozen handsome mallard ducks of both genders loafed on the sluggish water while a beautifully camouflaged Wilson's snipe rapidly probed its long bill up and down into the mud of inch-deep water along the shore to snare aquatic invertebrates to ingest.  Snipe are sandpipers that breed and winter inland, mostly along flowing streams and in grassy bogs.
     While watching the mallards and snipe, I saw a male downy woodpecker hitch itself up the trunk of an ash-leafed maple tree and chip audibly at patches of dead, loose bark to find invertebrates, or their eggs, under that protective bark.  And I noted a lone Carolina chickadee among the twigs and buds of that same tree, where it looked for insect eggs to consume.  Because these woodland birds search for food on different parts of each tree, they reduce competition for food between them and both species can live in the same wooded environments.
     While watching the charming woodpecker and chickadee working for a meal in the tree, I saw another flash of movement among the grasses along the water line of the opposite shore.  Looking with my field glasses, I saw the small bird was a winter wren along the little creek for the winter.  Its kind is more likely to winter along small waterways in woodlands, rather than along a tree-lined stream in farmland. 
     The wren crept down to the waterline and onto a tiny mudflat where it poked around for small invertebrates to eat.  Suddenly, a song sparrow came into my view on that same flat.  It, too, was searching for invertebrates to ingest.  Both the wren and sparrow actively moved about from narrow flat to small gravel bar at the water's edge in their quest for food.  Song sparrows are more likely to live in wider patches of tall grasses and shrubbery in cropland and suburban areas.  But, being adaptable, this one lives in a narrow strip of tall grasses, weeds and middle-aged trees.  And because both the wren and sparrow are adaptable, they are wintering side by side in a habitat that meets the needs of both birds.  Therefore, interestingly, the winter wren and song sparrow hunted for invertebrates on the same flats and bars along the lapping waters of the little creek.
     Winter wrens and song sparrows have a few characteristics in common.  They are basically brown, which camouflages them well among dead, fallen leaves on forest floors in the case of the wrens, and dead, beige grasses in overgrown fields in the case of the sparrows.   And both these little birds like small waterways where they find much invertebrate food.  They creep around on the ground like feathered mice when searching for food. 
     But, while song sparrows are permanent residents here, winter wrens are here only in winter and nest farther north and in the mountains of the United States.  And the sparrows also ingest seeds, something the wrens do not do.     
     The creek made all this beauty possible.  Farmers can't plow right up to the waterways' shores, so many of those shorelines become overgrown with a variety of tall vegetation which shelters wildlife.  Shrubby thickets harbor cardinals, finches and other wildlife species, woodpeckers, chickadees and other creatures get food and shelter from trees along the waterways' edges and winter wrens and song sparrows winter along stream banks where they find food on mud flats and gravel bars and shelter among tree roots and tall grasses.  Waterways provide oases of shelter for wildlife in cropland.        
     It was thrilling to see the winter wren because they are small, camouflaged, secretive and, therefore, seldom seen, even by birders.  And it was interesting to see two unrelated kinds of small birds sharing a common narrow habitat because they are both adaptable.  Nature is always full of beauties and surprises throughout the world.  Nothing is as enjoyable and inspiring to me and many other people as nature. 

Decorative Winter Plants

     Tall weeds and grasses are pretty in summer, with lovely flowers on the weeds.  But the seed heads of some of those same, still-standing plants are just as attractive in some fields and along certain streams, ponds, railroad tracks and rural roadsides in southeastern Pennsylvania in winter.  And they are, or had been, loaded with small seeds that provide food for mice and seed-eating birds through winter.  Hawks, owls, foxes, weasels and other predators prey on some of those small rodents and birds through that harshest of seasons. 
     Some of these plants are native to North America, while others are aliens from Eurasia.  But most of them flourish on the disturbed soil of human-made habitats in farmland, making those habitats more interesting in winter.  Some of them can be spotted when on a walk or ride in the countryside in winter when flowers' beauties are not available.
     Although the stems and flower heads of these still-standing plants are dead and dry in winter, the roots of many of them are still alive and will sprout during the next spring.  And clumps of these plants block winter wind and provide small critters shelter against predators. 
     Patches of the native, abundant and widely scattered goldenrod and aster plants have fluffy seed heads that are attractive when seen with sunlight glowing through them.  Each bit of fluff carries a tiny seed on the wind and away from the parent plant, thus spreading its common species across the landscape.  
     The abundant and alien foxtail grass and common purple top and broom grass are attractive in built habitats.  These grasses are most lovely when seen with low-slanting sunlight behind them.  The purple tops have a reddish or purple glow in the sunshine while broom grass is a rich orange-beige in winter.  The foxtails are most loaded with seeds which feed a lot of small birds in winter.  Sometimes one will spot a small flock of birds feeding on foxtail seeds.
     Several kinds of flowering plants have attractively solid-looking and sculptured-looking seed heads in winter.  All of them are aliens from Europe, except common milkweeds.  Winter milkweeds have gray, open seed pods that are empty in winter, having released their seeds into the wind.  Some of those pods resemble small birds perched on stems.
     Burdock, teasel and nodding thistle plants have bristly seed heads.  Burdocks have spiny, half-inch seed pods that are oval in shape.  Teasel seed heads are about an inch and a half tall, grayish and loaded with empty holes where the seeds developed and fell out.  Europeans in medieval times used the protective bristles on teasel flower heads to tease out wool.
     Common mullien plants grow up to six feet tall, are branched once or twice and look a bit like certain cacti along our roadsides.  The upward-pointing arms of mulliens are riddled with empty holes where seeds developed.  Medieval Europeans dipped those dead, dried stalks into liquid animal fat to allow the fat to soak into the numerous cavities.  They lighted the cold, solid fat on the stalks to be torches at night.
     Dead, still-standing evening primrose and Queen-Anne's-lace stalks are attractive in winter.  Seed pods of primroses are upright, a half-inch tall and beige, perhaps looking like tiny candle holders.  The gray-brown seed heads of Queen-Anne's-lace curl upward at their edges, making them resemble small birds' nests.  When covered with snow, those same seed heads look like snow cones.  `
     Three kinds of wetland plants, cattails, phragmites and bulrushes, are striking in winter.  All of them spread by roots pushing through the soil, and seeds.  The familiar cattails look like fat hot dogs stuck on top of sticks.  Deer mice and certain kinds of small birds use the fluff of cattails to line their nests.  Muskrats consume cattail roots and use their leaves and stems to make their homes in shallow ponds.
     Phragmites grow up to ten feet tall and have large, attractive, feathery-looking plumes on top that glow in low-slanting, winter sunlight.  Stands of these tall plants block winter wind and provide cover for a variety of wildlife.     
     Bulrushes are wetland grasses that grow to be more than three feet high.  Their decorative seed heads droop from their stems, making these plants picturesque.  Mallards and other kinds of puddle ducks eat their seeds while muskrats ingest their stalks. 
     These are some of the attractive dead plants that can be spotted in farmland in winter.  When out for a walk or ride in the countryside, look for some of these inspiring beauties.
        

Barberries and Burning Bushes

     The attractive Japanese barberry bushes and burning bushes have been planted on many lawns in eastern North America for their beauties, especially in their autumn leaves during October and November.  But these shrubs are aliens from eastern Asia, invasive and have many other characteristics in common, which makes them interesting.
     Both these species of beautiful shrubs are most noticeable in November when their striking, red leaves stand out.  And I think they are particularly attractive in the shrub layers of certain woods,  woodland edges, hedgerows between fields and roadsides where they sprouted on their own from seeds.  The red leaves of those wild bushes brighten those natural and human-made habitats. 
     Both kinds of shrubs traveled from lawns to wild habitats by starlings, American robins, eastern bluebirds, cedar waxwings and other kinds of birds consuming their strikingly red berries in autumn and into winter.  A northern mockingbird, a few robins and a little groups of bluebirds have eaten red berries off barberries on our lawn in winter over the years.  All those bird species easily see the red berries, digest their pulp, but pass their seeds in droppings as they fly across the countryside and into the woods.  Many of those seeds that are not ingested by mice and squirrels sprout into new shrubs.  Barberries and burning bushes have become firmly established in many woodlands in recent years. 
     In the distant past, apparently, those barberries and burning bushes that produced red berries had a better chance of reproducing themselves because birds can see colors to pick out and eat ripe fruit of various kinds.  And birds don't have teeth to chew the seeds, which would kill plant embryos inside them.  And because those embryos develop in tough shells that don't get digested by the birds' stomachs, they survive the birds' ingesting the berries.  Therefore, those birds pass viable seeds, ensuring themselves of future food supplies.
     Small birds that raise young in shrubbery can also rear offspring in barberry bushes and burning bushes.  Both species have multitudes of stems, twigs and leaves that shelter young birds in their nurseries.  Barberries also have thin, sharp thorns that help keep predators at bay.  A pair each of northern cardinals and gray catbirds have nested in our barberries over the years, but not in the same ones at the same time.  I have not seen their cradles of twigs and rootlets when young were in them, but I see parents of both species repeatedly taking insects into that shrubbery in summer and emerging with white droppings from the babies in their beaks to drop away from the nests.  And I see the abandoned nests in winter when the leaves are off those bushes.
     Barberries and burning bushes are beautiful shrubs, particularly in October and November when their foliage turns red.  But they are invasive in woodlands and other habitats because of birds eating their berries.  However, I think both these adaptable species are here to stay in the wild.  And we have to redefine what plants compose a woodland shrub layer.  Though many people are not fond of these bushes in the woods, they do brighten that habitat and benefit a variety of wildlife as well. 

November's Migrant Hawks and Eagles

     In November, when a cold front comes through southeastern and southcentral Pennsylvania with its roaring, cold, northwest or north winds after a few days of sullen, rainy weather, many hawks and eagles of several kinds migrate through this area, mostly along the southwest running Appalachian Mountains.  Sharp-shinned hawks, northern harriers, merlins and red-shouldered hawks are some of those hawk species, in limited numbers.  But red-tailed hawks, bald eagles and golden eagles steal the raptor migration show during those wild days in November; red-tails because of their big numbers and eagles because they are eagles.  Those last three kinds of majestic raptors cause moments of excitement, inspiration and beauty. 
     Of course, all these hawks and eagles are migrating south from farther north.  And they do so each fall, not to escape winter's cold, but to find reliable food supplies farther south to sustain themselves through that harshest of seasons.
     The strong northwest winds are pushed up the southwest running Appalachians by wind from behind.  Dead, deciduous leaves, corn leaves from the valleys below and other debris are briskly pushed up the slopes by the wind as well.  And hawks and eagles are held aloft along the length of the mountains, particularly the Kittitinny Ridge, by those same winds.  Those soaring raptors are pushed up by the wind, but gravity wants to pull them down.  With a steadying balance of wings and tails, hawks and eagles forge ahead for hours and many miles with scarcely a wing beat, which saves them a lot of energy.  
     There are several rocky lookout spots, open to the public, on the Kittitinny Ridge, including Bake Oven Knob, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary and Waggoner's Gap, where these migrating raptors can be easily seen.  But many migrating hawks and eagles follow other southwest running ridges in autumn as well. 
     Sometimes the winds are from the south or east, or don't exist at all.  Then raptors scatter off the Appalachians and search for thermals that will carry them up and south.  Thermals are sun-heated air that rises.  Hawks and eagles get into them and soar upward, circling higher and higher.  Then they peel out of the thermal and drift south or southwest for many miles.  But because of gravity, those raptors are obliged to seek thermals time after time to give them lift with little effort. 
     The adaptable, abundant red-tails migrate over Pennsylvania in large numbers, mostly from the end of October, through November and into early December.  These large hawks sometimes soar one close after another along the Kittitinny during blustery, northwest winds.  But they are also spotted migrating in small groups or lines over farmland in southeastern Pennsylvania, creating feelings of excitement and inspiration among those people who notice them there.  Some of those migrant red-tails winter in southeastern Pennsylvania, where they mingle with residents of their kind.
     The stately bald eagles migrate through here singly from August into December.  This type of eagle can be spotted most anywhere during its autumn migration, around rivers and impoundments where they catch fish, and over farmland where they scavenge dead animals.  I've even seen a few soaring over the town of New Holland in the last couple of years.  Fully adult balds have the white heads and tails we are familiar with.  But first year bald eagles are mostly dark brown with blotches of white here and there.  Many balds, both young and older, spend winters in the Mid-Atlantic States.      But, I suppose, the magnificent golden eagles are the most exciting of raptors to migrate through southeastern Pennsylvania, from late October into December, with a peak of migration during November.  Goldens that pass over this area nested in Maine and eastern Canada.  And most of them winter in wooded valleys between wooded mountains in West Virginia.  There they kill and ingest rabbits, foxes and other kinds of mammals, and birds, and scavenge dead animals, including white-tailed deer.
     Fall hawk migrations extend from August through December, but each species has its own pattern of migration.  The majestic red-tails, bald eagles and golden eagles are those raptors that are most prevalent and exciting during November into December.  Lucky are the people who see some of these migrant raptors, including in southeastern and south-central Pennsylvania.   
               

Juncos and White-Throats

     For a couple of hours on the afternoon of November 9, 2017, I went to a landfill area just outside Morgantown, Pennsylvania to look for small birds in thickets.  While driving slowly back a gravel lane along a woodland edge, I saw hundreds of ring-billed gulls wheeling together overhead, flocks of starlings perched on tall, wire fences that enclosed the landfill, a few American crows in trees and several turkey vultures soaring on high and over the landfill.  Suddenly, I saw several little birds fly off the gravel road ahead of me and into the bordering woods.  Those small birds probably were eating tiny stones to help grind the seeds in their stomachs.  I stopped, scanned the birds with 16 power binoculars and saw they were dark-eyed juncos.  As they left the road, I estimated there were about 50 of them, but I only saw a few in the woods.  Most of the juncos ducked out of sight and  were camouflaged against tree trunks and fallen leaves on the woodland floor.  Juncos are as gray as a November sky on top, but their bellies are as white as snow.
     For a short time I watched for the juncos to come out of hiding, but none of them did.  I turned the car around and slowly drove out the way I came in.  About halfway down the gravel lane, I saw about 12 white-throated sparrows in a weedy thicket.  They were busily eating seeds off the tops of tall weeds and grasses.  But being brown and dark-streaked, they were not easy to see among the dead weeds and grasses.  And, as their name implies, each handsome sparrow that I did see through binoculars had a white throat patch.    
     Just before I got to the blacktop road, I saw another flock of small birds on the gravel, probably ingesting bits of stones.  When I looked at them through field glasses, I noticed they were a group of about 100 juncos.  Unfortunately for the birds and me, I car whizzed by on the blacktop and the juncos flew into a stand of red junipers and nearby woods.  
     The eastern race of dark-eyed juncos and I go back a long way to my childhood.  The first ones I saw were about a dozen of them wintering in our garden outside Rohrerstown, Pennsylvania.  They were feeding on weed seeds in that garden, but flew away when I accidentally approached them, the two white, outer tail feathers of each bird creating an up-side-down V as they hastened from me.
     I also saw wintering juncos in some stands of planted, fragrant coniferous trees that happened to be near patches of tall weeds and grasses.  As I approached the evergreens, I would see juncos disappearing among needled boughs, chipping excitedly as they went and flashing their white V's.  Their chipping and lively activities made those clumps of conifers come alive during winter.
     I first saw little groups of wintering white-throats in thickets along woodland edges when I was a young adult.  And I see them on older lawns with many tall trees and shrubbery.  The heads of male white-throats are quite striking with black and white striping on their crowns and a yellow spot between the beak and each eye.  And each male has a vividly-white throat.
     Male white-throats sing beautifully in winter, mostly at dusk.  Each one perches in a thicket and whistles a long note, then another long note on a higher pitch, followed by four short ones on the same pitch as the second note.  A few male white-throats singing pleasantly together in a thicket make a cold, winter twilight more bearable.  Their songs are appealing and heart-warming.
     Juncos and white-throats have some traits in common.  Neither of these handsome, abundant sparrow species nest in southeastern Pennsylvania, but farther north and west, and down the Appalachian Mountains in the case of the juncos.  Both eat weed and grass seeds in winter.  Both kinds also winter on lawns and regularly come to bird feeders, including in our yard.  
     Wintering dark-eyed juncos and white-throated sparrows add much beauty and interest to thickets, stands of evergreens and lawns in southeastern Pennsylvania,  as elsewhere.  They help brighten many a cold, dreary winter's day with their lively activities.

Great Black-Backs

     For an hour and a half one afternoon this November, Sue and I went to the Susquehanna River at Wrightsville, Pennsylvania to enjoy river scenery and whatever birds were on the river.  There were several ring-billed gulls along the river, as always in winter, and a few great blue herons wading the shallows in search of fish.  But I was most impressed with the 40 striking, adult great black-backed gulls we saw on the river from the western shore of a quarter-mile stretch of river between the Route 462 bridge and the Route 30 bridge that span the Susquehanna.  I don't think I ever saw as many adult black-backs as that afternoon along the inland Susquehanna River.  Most of them stood on mid-river rocks, but a few floated on the water.  And there a few mottled-brown immature black-backs on the river with the adults.  It takes four years for a black-backed gull to acquire its adult, breeding plumage of black and white.   
     We saw seven adult black-backs perched on seven outdoor light shields on the mile-long 462 bridge we crossed to get to the western shore at Wrightsville.  Those gulls were totally undisturbed by passing vehicles, so we got close looks at them as we drove by.  Even on those outdoor lights, they were handsome and stately.
     Great black-backs are North America's largest gulls.  And they are becoming more abundant on this continent.  They are about the size of geese and adults are white all over, except for their black upper wings and backs.  When in flight, adult black-backs can resemble adult bald eagles.  But the white bellies of the gulls soon give them away as adult black-backs.  This species also has pink legs and feet, and yellow beaks with a blotch of red on the tip of the lower mandible. 
     Great black-backed gulls are magnificent soaring and wheeling in the sky over the river, and estuaries, and back waters off the oceans.  They bank as they soar, alternately flashing the white of their underparts, then the black of their wings and backs.
     In summer, black-backs eat the eggs and small young of water birds and the adults of smaller species of coastal birds, as well as fish and carrion.  And in winter, they loosely gather with others of their kind, and herring gulls, which are nearly as big as the black-backs.  Now black-backs consume fish they catch themselves, scavenge most anything edible and rob smaller, fish-catching birds of the seafood they caught.    
     Great black-backed gulls nest on both coasts of the North Atlantic from northern Labrador, Central Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia and northwest Russia south to Long Island and Brittany.  And they winter from southern Greenland south to the Great Lakes and the North Carolina coast in North America.  Winter is when we in the Middle Atlantic States see the most black-backs.
     Black-backs raise young either in solitary pairs or in little colonies on small coastal islands and isolated peninsulas.  Their nurseries are made of twigs, grass, moss, seaweed and other handy, natural materials in a depression in soil or among rocks on as lofty a spot as they can find and defend from rivals.  Each female lays three buffy-olive eggs that have dark brown blotches.  The young hatch fluffy, pale brown with darker markings, wide-eyed and ready to beg their parents for food.
     Great black-backs are the largest and most majestic of gulls in North America.  I am always happy to see gatherings of them loafing on mid-river rocks or soaring on high along the Susquehanna in winter.  They add more beauty, intrigue and wildness to that river, as they do elsewhere.      
    
      

Picturesque Winter Trees

     The "skeletons" of deciduous trees are visible in winter, after their colorful veils of foliage have dropped to the ground.  The bark and the rugged shapes of standing trees are just as handsome in winter as their leaves are in summer and autumn.  Nine species of native trees here in southeastern Pennsylvania are especially attractive to me because of their protective bark and interesting shapes.  These species are striking, and distinctive, which makes each one identifiable in winter.  And those same kinds of trees can get massive, which adds to their charm.
     Sycamore and silver maple trees grow mostly along waterways.  Sycamores are noted for their mottled bark and seed balls that hang on long stems from the ends of twigs.  As the older, darker bark falls away in little pieces, the lighter, younger bark is visible, causing the mottled appearance on trunk and branches.  Because of sycamores' blotched bark and growing along waterways, one can see from a distance where waterways are.      
     Silver maples have rough bark and scraggly shapes.  But both this maple, and sycamores, help hold down stream-side soil with their roots and have many cavities caused by wind ripping limbs off their trees, causing the wood underneath to rot out.  Raccoons, wood ducks, barred owls, chickadees and other kinds of wildlife live in those different-sized hollows, and raise young in them.
     Shagbark hickories, pin oaks and white oaks grow best in woods on moist bottomlands, but not necessarily along waterways.  Maturing shagbarks have many vertical sheets of bark on their trunks and limbs, each one of which is loose and curls up at both ends, but its center is still attached to the tree.  Those many strips of bark give each hickory a shaggy, rustic, interesting appearance.  Gray squirrels and other kinds of rodents gnaw into the green husks and white shells of hickory nuts to consume the meat inside.  Only rodents have jaws strong enough and teeth sharp enough to do that.
     Pin oaks have lower limbs that droop to the ground, which identifies them.  This type of oak produces small acorns, each with a "pin" on its end.  Those nuts are hidden away by blue jays, gray squirrels and eastern chipmunks for winter use.  And other kinds of wildlife, including black bears, white-tailed deer, white-footed mice, other kinds of squirrels, American crows and wild turkeys, consume pin oak acorns as well.  
     White oaks have grooved, pale-gray bark that identifies them.  Their sweet acorns are eaten by the same creatures mentioned above, plus people.
     Tulip poplar trees, American beeches and sugar maples inhabit drier bottomland woods.  Tulip trees have straight trunks, shallow grooves in their smooth bark, beige, winged seeds that twirl and scatter in the wind to the ground and many upright, inch-long spikes that the seeds were attached to before dispersing.  The spikes are pointed at the upper end and can be used as toothpicks.  
     Beeches have attractively smooth, gray bark that identifies them.  And they have small nuts in bristly husks that feed the same critters mentioned above.  Massive beeches have many cavities that house a variety of woodland wildlife.              
     Sugar maples have rugged-looking bark that flares out in many places along the trunk and branches, but is tightly attached to them.  Large sugar maples have many hollows that house several kinds of cavity-living wildlife.   
     These are some of my favorite trees in winter, obviously for a variety of reasons.  They help make winter landscapes more beautiful and intriguing.  And they provide food and cover for several types of wildlife.   

Winter Signs of Insects

     Only the warm-blooded birds and mammals are active and noticed in the Middle Atlantic States in winter.  Cold-blooded creatures, including insects, are not seen much during that harshest of seasons.  But in winter we see several signs of the insect activities that happened during the warmer months when they were active.  Those signs of insects make being outdoors in winter more interesting.  Those signs indicate the presence of insects, and a bit of their life histories that we can read in winter.
     The nests of two kinds of wasps and a related hornet are seen in winter with little effort.  Northern paper wasps live in sunny, open habitats.  Adults of this species sip nectar, and juice from rotting fruit, while their larvae in their six-sided, paper cells consume insects caught, pre-chewed and brought to the larvae by adult wasps.
     In spring, about a dozen reddish-brown and yellow-ringed female paper wasps work together to make an uncovered paper nest of several cells that they attach up-side-down to an overhanging boulder, roof or other sheltering place.  Cell openings point down to shed rain.  Each paper nest of these wasps is constructed of chewed wood and the wasps' saliva.         
     Worker female black and yellow mud dauber wasps gather small bits of mud and shape them into a few vertical, side-by-side, tubular cells, each over two inches long, under roofs, cliffs and other protective niches.  Each tube has a few compartments.  A paralyzed spider is deposited in each cell, a wasp egg is laid on each spider and the cell is closed off with mud.  Each larva eats its spider, pupates in its cell and emerges as an adult.  Adult wasps ingest flower nectar.
     Worker female bald-faced hornets chew wood and mix it with their saliva to make football-sized, paper nests in deciduous trees on lawns and in woods and meadows.  Each hornet nest is composed of many six-sided cells inside, completely covered by a few layers of gray paper with an entrance in the bottom of that nursery.  All adult hornets sip flower nectar, but larvae eat pre-chewed insects, delivered to them in their cells by the adults.  In fall, males and female workers die and the queen of each colony burrows into the soil to await spring.  Therefore, each decorative nest is empty in mid-winter and can be safely collected with no harm to hornets or people.  The hornets will never use that nursery again.
     Small groups of female eastern carpenter bees are so-named because each one of them chews round holes the size of their bodies and a few inches deep in the undersides of dead wood in trees and human-made structures, including fence railings and covered bridges.  Each female places a ball of pollen and nectar in the back of the tube she chewed out and lays an egg on that ball.  Then she seals off that chamber with wood chips and places another ball of pollen and nectar in the next chamber to the front, lays an egg on it and seals it.  She continues that until her burrow is full and sealed off.  Each larva consumes its food, pupates in its chamber and emerges as an adult.
     The predatory praying mantises survive winter in the egg stage in round, beige-colored, styrofoam-like masses, each about one inch across and attached to a weed or twig in an overgrown field.  Each female exudes froth as she lays eggs at some time in October.  That froth hardens and protects the embryos inside until they hatch the next May.
     One can see the tunnels of carpenter ants in standing dead trees in winter.  Piles of sawdust grow under the entrances to their homes as the ants throw that waste wood out of their burrows.  Those excavations protect the ant colonies where they live and rear young.  But pileated woodpeckers chip vertically rectangular holes in dead wood of trees to extract and consume carpenter ants.
     Various kinds of bark beetles are small, and live and pupate between the dead wood and bark of standing trees.  They chew elaborate tunnels under the protective bark, which, to us, are beautifully intricate patterns when the bark falls away.  Woodpeckers chip many bark beetles out of the wood and consume them.
     Rounded galls on goldenrod stems were made by the larvae of spot-winged flies.  Female flies lay eggs on new stems in late May.  Each larva burrows into a stem and eats out a chamber.  The irritated plant forms a gall around that chamber.  The larva overwinters in that form, and in spring chews a tunnel to the surface wall of its home, pupates in its chamber and pushes through the final thin wall as an adult fly.  We see the swollen part of the stem and the hole in it.
     Elliptical goldenrod galls are formed by the larvae of a kind of small moth.  In autumn, each adult, female moth lays eggs singly on the lower leaves and stems of goldenrods where those eggs overwinter.  In the warmth of spring, the larvae hatch, crawl to new goldenrod shoots and dig into end buds to the stems where they feed on that vegetable material.  The stem forms an elongated gall around each larva.  In late July, each larva bores an exit hole in the upper end of its chamber and plugs it with its silk, and plant material.  Then each larva pupates and emerges late in August as an adult moth.  Elliptical galls are empty in winter.     
     In the middle of April, colonies of sibling tent caterpillars build webs in crotches of limbs on various kinds of cherry trees to protect themselves from birds and other insects that would consume them.  Each day they leave their webbed nests to eat leaves.  Their homes grow as they do and are soon littered with feces and shed skins.  By late May they leave that webbing to pupate in the ground, later emerging as small moths ready to breed.  The tattered webs remain in the trees until winter.
     In August, colonies of sibling fall webworms build large webbed nests, mostly in black walnut trees.  Webworms construct webs at the ends of leafy branches and enclose the foliage in those protective homes.  They ingest leaves inside the web where they are better protected from birds and other critters that would eat them.  The larvae leave the webs late in fall and pupate in the soil, leaving empty homes behind as reminders to us of their late-summer activities.
     The one-inch-long bagworms are the larvae of a kind of small moth.  These caterpillars carry their protective cocoons with them as they eat vegetation.  Each larva covers its home with bits of the vegetable material, including that of northern white cedars and red junipers, it ingests, which camouflages that creature.  Eventually it fastens its home to a twig and pupates inside it. 
     Emerging adult males have one-inch wingspans.  Females don't develop wings or legs and never leave their cocoons.  No adult eats anything.  Males find females in the latters' homes and mate with them.  Each female lays eggs in her cocoon and dies.  The eggs overwinter in their mother's cocoon that reminds us of the moths' summer activities as caterpillars.
     The summer activities of insects are fascinating, and we can see remnants of those life histories in winter.  All we have to do is get out and look for them in any and every habitat.                        

Beauty in the Everyday

     I visited Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area for an hour and a half on November 6 of this year to see what water birds were on the various human-made impoundments.  Several kinds of the usual birds were there for this time of year, including hundreds of Canada geese on the water and in the air, accompanied by their excited and exciting honking.
     There were the usual kinds of puddle ducks, for Middle Creek, on those impoundments.  A couple dozen black ducks were scattered on a few ponds and the main lake and about 12 mallard ducks were all in one group on one pond.  And there were a few individuals each of northern pintails, gadwalls and northern shovelers on a couple small impoundments. 
     I saw two kinds of diving ducks at Middle Creek, including about 20 each of ring-necked ducks and bufflehead ducks.  There was an equal number of males and females among the ring-necks on one pond, but mostly female buffleheads on another small impoundment.  Both these kinds of ducks were entertaining to watch diving and surfacing as they swam to the bottom of the impoundments to bring up aquatic vegetation to eat.
     And there were three types of fish-eating birds visible at Middle Creek.  Three double-crested cormorants roosted on tree stumps in a shallow part of the main lake.  Apparently, they were resting between fishing forays.  I saw at least six stately great blue herons wading slowly, carefully in the shallows of the big lake to snare fish, while an immature bald eagle perched majestically on a limb of golden leaves in a large, shoreline tree.  
     While watching, close at hand, scattered groups of Canada geese and black ducks resting quietly and peacefully in the gray shallows of the main lake under gray skies and against the deciduous woodland that still had some colored foliage along that impoundment's southern shore, I suddenly realized I was looking at an everyday, but beautiful scene suitable for painting or photographing.  The resting gray geese and dark ducks blended into the water, dead tree stumps in the shallows and dead trees that fell into the water near the shoreline, making them barely visible with the naked eye at first.  Some of the geese and ducks sat on the dead stumps and fallen trees, while others of both species floated on the water.  Meanwhile, a couple of great blues stalked fish among the stumps, fallen logs and waterfowl, while the camouflaged, but regal eagle seemed to survey his domain.
     The somber feathering of the geese, ducks, herons and eagle all blended into their gray and dark-brown autumn and winter surroundings.  Yet all those birds and their gray-brown surroundings were attractive in their simplicity, and utility to hide the birds in their niches.  The water, dead trees and large water birds all fit together, as the birds fit perfectly in their habitat.  And everything together made a pretty picture that I carry in my memory.     
     There are innumerable, beautiful pictures of everyday landscapes, plants and wildlife throughout the world that are worthy of painting or photographing.  One only has to have the God-given ability to see beauty in those commonplace settings.  And there is a comfort in viewing ordinary beauties close to home.      
     Look for the beauties and intrigues of the common, everyday plants and wildlife in any habitat you happen to be in.  There is as much beauty in nature at home as anywhere else on Earth.  One just has to look for it. 
        

A Few Food Chains

     For nearly two hours on the warm, sunny afternoon of November 2, 2017, I drove slowly through cropland just outside New Holland, Pennsylvania to see colored foliage and whatever wildlife was visible.  I stopped here and there to enjoy nature more closely.  Red maple, red oak, pin oak, white oak and staghorn sumac trees had red leaves and tulip trees, shagbark hickories and sassafras trees had yellow ones, making striking displays of autumn foliage along hedgerows, and in fields and pastures where lone trees exist.
     I didn't see a big variety of wildlife that afternoon, but what I did notice made me think again about food chains in the wild, including in farmland.  For example, I stopped for about 15 minutes at the edge of a two-acre patch of red juniper trees because I saw that some of those junipers had many cones on them.  Those cones are berry-like, light-blue in color and attractive in themselves, and in the pretty, interesting birds that consume them, including American robins, eastern bluebirds, cedar waxwings, yellow-rumped warblers and other kinds of birds wintering in this area.
      A flock of American robins were feasting on those tiny cones while I was watching the junipers.  Those wintering birds darted from tree to tree to eat cones and some robins dropped to the ground, presumably to ingest invertebrates on that warm afternoon.  Those birds digest the pulp of the cones, but pass the seeds in their droppings wherever they go, thus spreading the juniper species.
     The attractive, green-needled junipers, their pretty cones and the feeding robins presented a lovely, peaceful scene.  But if a Cooper's hawk showed up among those junipers, the scene would be  different in an instant.  The robins, and any other types of birds, would vanish immediately.  Coop's prey on starlings, robins, mourning doves, rock pigeons and other kinds of medium-sized birds.  And this type of hawk, with its short, powerful wings and long, steering tail, is built for speedy, maneuverable flight among trees to catch panicky, dodging birds.
     I drove on a quarter of a mile and stopped at a one-acre park of several large red oaks, white oaks and shagbark hickories across a rural road from a deciduous woodlot and a couple of lawns that had red maples, pin oaks and other kinds of trees in them.  Several gray squirrels and an eastern chipmunk were busily scurrying on the ground in the park to gather and store acorns and hickory nuts for use this coming winter.  Squirrels stash their edible prizes, one at a time, in tree cavities and little holes they dig in the soil; one nut per hole.  Chippies, however, fill their twin cheek pouches with acorns and other edibles and run down their underground burrows to a storage chamber where they empty their cheeks, then leave their dens to look for more food.  Squirrels and chipmunks gather nuts much of each day for several days in fall to ensure their survival in winter.
     The large, strong red-tailed hawks, and other predators, prey on the daytime-active squirrels and chipmunks.  Some of the acorns and other nuts those rodents buried in the ground, therefore, are not eaten by them.  Those nuts sprout into new, seedling oak and hickory trees, ensuring a supply of edible nuts in the future.  Death for some rodents is life for others in the future.
     While the gray squirrels and chippies rustled among colorful, fallen leaves on the ground to find nuts, a handful of striking, but silent, blue jays flew in and out of a beautiful pin oak tree across the road from the park.  Time after time, each of those jays plucked an acorn from its twig and flew off with the nut in its beak to store it in a tree hollow or the ground for winter use.  Each jay pokes a hole in the soil with its strong, black bill, pushes the nut into that depression and pulls soil back over it with its bill.  This they do much of each day for several days in fall.  But some of those little acorns sprout the next spring.
     Cooper's hawks are big and strong enough to catch and kill blue jays for food.  Those hawks watch the jays at work and look for opportunities to ambush one or more.  The jays do their best to escape by swerving in mid-air and diving into shrubbery, but Coop's are swift on the wing, can change direction "on a dime" and plunge into shrubbery after their intended prey, all in a flash.
     These are only a few local food chains in farmland.  There are innumerable other food chains throughout Earth.  And they make our lives more interesting when we notice some of them.       

              
    

An Hour of Farmland Hawks

     I suddenly saw the northern harrier cruising slowly into the wind and low over a field of red clover and foxtail grass.  Its long, stretched-out wings tilted slightly from side to side as the hawk constantly  stabilized itself in the south wind.  That hawk of marshes, salt marshes and other open habitats was hunting field mice and small birds.  And if that immature raptor had detected prey, it would have dropped to the ground to seize it in its long, sharp talons.
     For an hour on the late afternoon of October 30 of this year, I was driving on rural roads in farmland just south of New Holland, Pennsylvania.  It was a lovely, sunny day, but with cold wind typical of late october.  I was out to see birds or any other kinds of wildlife,  as well as pretty scenery and colored foliage on trees in meadows and fields.
     I did see a few kinds of adaptable, common birds during that hour of driving through cropland, including rock pigeons perched on silos and mourning doves sitting in partly-bare trees or flying over fields.  I also saw a few blue jays flying from hedgerow to hedgerow and a northern mockingbird in a multiflora rose bush in one of those hedges between fields.  And I saw a few pairs of mallard ducks swimming on a stream and a small flock of horned larks eating seeds on a recently plowed field.
     But it was the hawks and a bald eagle I noticed among the fields that made my little trip that afternoon the most interesting.  As I was driving out of New Holland and into the surrounding cropland, I saw a Cooper's hawk flying low and fast toward town.  It probably was in farmland all day to catch pigeons, doves, starlings and other birds and was now going to New Holland to perch overnight high in a tall spruce tree.
     Although Cooper's hawks traditionally live and hunt birds in woodlands, some pairs of them raise young in older suburban areas with tall coniferous trees.  A couple pairs of these raptors hatch offspring high in sheltering conifers in New Holland every year in recent years.  Perhaps that Coop was from one of those local families and it was going home to roost for the night.
     A little farther out of town, I saw a large, dark bird circling over the farmland ahead.  I stopped the car and trained my 16 power binoculars on it.  I saw its white tail when it turned in the sky!  It was a majestic adult bald eagle!!
     That eagle could have been a migrant going south for the winter.  Or it might have been a locally living bird because a pair of balds have raised at least a few pairs of young just outside of New Holland in recent years.  That eagle may have been one of the old pair, or one of their older young.
     I spotted the harrier a few minutes after I saw the eagle.  That harrier, no doubt, was a migrant from farther north or west because none of its kind nests here in southeastern Pennsylvania.  They are always a thrill to spot because they are big, graceful and pass through here in limited numbers.  
     Moving along, I saw a pretty male American kestrel on a roadside wire in the farmland I was in.  He might have been a locally-hatched bird or a migrant, as both are here at this time of year.  Either way, he was watching the grassy, weedy roadside shoulders for mice and grasshoppers to eat.
     I parked along another stretch of country road to scan nearby fields and hedgerows for birds and mammals.  There is where I saw the mockingbird and jays.  And I spotted a stately, immature red-tailed hawk perched on a dead limb of a live tree in a mid-field clump of tall trees.  That raptor was watching for gray squirrels, field mice and any other creatures it could catch and kill.  As I watched it, the red-tail took flight, circled a field a few times and landed on another dead branch on another live tree.  This red-tail could have been a migrant or a locally-hatched bird, as several pairs of red-tails nest in lone trees in fields and pastures, and wood lots, in this area.
     Though I looked for wildlife in Lancaster County cropland for only an hour, I was thrilled and inspired by the beautiful scenery, lovely weather and wonderful birds I saw in that human-made habitat.  It was time well spent.         

Beauty in a Bottomland Woods

     Yesterday, October 31, 2017, I went to Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania to enjoy the sunlight, cool breezes and colored leaves of late autumn, and to see what critters were visible in its eight-acre, human-made impoundment, and the upstream, bottomland woods along the stream-sized, woods-flanked Conewago Creek that flows into that lake.  Woods-shrouded Conewago Creek parallels Route 117 on one side of that road which runs by Mt. Gretna on a wooded slope on the other side of the road.    
     I started at the impoundment that was beautifully ringed mostly by red maple trees that had red leaves on October 31, white oak trees with red and brown foliage and an understory of speckled alder bushes.  A group of eight Canada geese were standing on a small lawn of short grass on a shore of the lake, while a flock of about 24 mallard ducks floated in shallow water along a shore of that impoundment.  The ducks were restless, swimming about from spot to spot on the lake, and I noticed a drake pintail duck and a pair of black ducks swimming with the mallards.  The mallards may have been locally-hatched birds, but the pintail and black ducks definitely were migrants.
     As I watched the geese and mallards for a few minutes, I saw a belted kingfisher fly from tree to tree and a migrant double-crested cormorant perched on a shoreline tree.  Both these birds are catchers of small fish and so make meals of the young bluegill sunfish that live in this lake.  Kingfishers snare fish by diving, beak-first, from perches on tree limbs or other shoreline objects, and hovering into the wind on rapidly beating wings and dropping head-first into the water to snatch their prey with their long bills.  Cormorants float on the water like ducks and boats, dive under water from the surface, swim with their webbed feet and grab fish in their long beaks.  
     As I walked into the wooded bottomland from Route 117, I crossed a little, wooden foot-bridge and peered into the water.  Their little schools of black-nosed dace, a kind of small, stream-lined fish, swam upstream in alarm of my presence on shore.  Green herons, northern water snakes and kingfishers make meals of dace when they are along this creek.      
     As I walked farther into the bottomland woods, I saw many tall, stately tulip trees, red oaks and white pines.  There was still much pretty, colored foliage on the tulip trees and oaks, but there also was a carpet of crunchy leaves from both those trees on the forest floor.  That woodland seemed particularly cheery looking because of the yellow tulip tree leaves on the trees and the ground at the same time.
     I took a seat near the brook-sized Conewago Creek in a wooded bottomland that had a couple of tiny trickles of water running through it to the creek.  There I sat quietly and waited for creatures to show up.  As I waited, I saw many tulip tree seeds whirling down in the wind like a beige snowfall.  Each seed is able to twirl some distance from its parent tree because of its thin blade, thus spreading the species across the landscape.     
     I also noticed the red berries on multiflora rose bushes in a little clearing in the woods, on spicebushes in the woodland understory and, especially, on the many winterberry shrubs in that same bottomland understory.  All those red berries made that woods very attractive.  And the spicebushes even had yellow foliage at the time. 
     While I sat and watched, I saw a blue jay perched in a tree, while a gray squirrel consumed winterberry berries.  And I saw a small group of cedar waxwings fluttering out to catch flying insects in mid-air and return to perches to eat their victims. 
     A Carolina chickadee, a tufted titmouse, a ruby-crowned kinglet, a few golden-crowned kinglets and a pair of northern cardinals flitted among foliage and fed on tiny insects in the shrub layer of the woods.  Meanwhile, a winter wren scurried about on the woodland floor like a feathered mouse.  The wren was searching for tiny invertebrates to ingest.  The chickadee relatives and the kinglets were camouflaged in their shrub layer, which helps protect them from predators.  And the wren, being brown, blends into its niche of brown carpets of fallen leaves on forest floors.  And chickadees and kinglets among shrubs don't compete for food with the wren on the ground.     
     Once again I noticed that many of the little forest birds are not visible for a while.  Then, suddenly, there they are at once, scurrying and feeding, only to all suddenly disappear again.  Maybe they all come out together to confuse predators.  Or one bird may start feeding and the others take that as a sign that all is well and they come out to get food as well.
     But the biggest mystery of the day was the dragonfly I saw land on a tiny patch of mud along a leaf-filled trickle in that wooded bottomland.  The dragonfly was brown all over, with a lot of green spotting on its thorax and a little green on its abdomen.  And it had four clear wings.  I thought it to be a female because her abdomen was pushing against the mud as though she was depositing eggs in it.  Though I looked through a couple of field guides to insects and the internet to identify her, I could not.  But she was pretty and interesting anyway.
     I was grateful to have been in a lovely woodland on a beautiful, late-fall day.  And the wildlife added more enjoyment and excitement, and a bit of mystery, to the day      

Encounters With Skunks

     The first striped skunk I ever saw in the flesh and wild was when I was about 12 years old and living outside Rohrerstown, Pennsylvania.  One sunny summer evening, I climbed a small tree in a hedgerow of trees and other plants along a stream in farmland close to home to be on the lookout for wildlife.  I wasn't there long until I saw a male indigo bunting and a pair of northern cardinals flitting about in shrubbery.  Then, suddenly, a lone gray fox trotted under the tree I was in and was away quickly into nearby shrubbery.  A few minutes later a striped skunk meandered under the tree and waddled off under the bushes close at hand.  Looking back, that was a thrilling evening for me!
     I have seen other striped skunks in Lancaster County through the years since that time, and all of them have been exciting to experience.  Fortunately, I never got sprayed by any of them.
     I saw one walking through woods in daylight outside Mt. Gretna.  Unfortunately for me, I didn't see it until I was fairly close.  Luckily, however, the skunk didn't seem to notice, or care, about my presence and just ambled on.  
     When I lived in Neffsville, Pa. a skunk had the habit of visiting one of our trash cans each evening for a few weeks to eat edible garbage.  When I realized the pattern of this critter, I sat in my car most every evening and waited for it to come to the can.  I was in the car to not scare away the skunk and also for my own protection.  When the skunk arrived, I turned on the car headlights to see him better.  He wiggled into a hole in the can, then came out with a tidbit to ingest.  Then back in he went, and again and again.  He continued when I went into the house.  But that skunk was quite entertaining!    
     We had another skunk living in our back yard in Neffsville, but we didn't know it until a heavy thunderstorm one afternoon.  I had a brush pile of yard clippings in a ditch on the edge of our lawn.  After the heavy rain that afternoon, a torrent of water rushed along the ditch and into the brush pile.  I watched that pile, in hopes of seeing creatures coming out of it.  Sure enough, an opossum came out and went up a pine tree, and a skunk emerged from that pile and waddled across the lawn and gone.
     A third skunk in our Neffsville yard I heard first.  I walked out on our lawn one late night in October to get a little fresh air and heard nearby thumping.  Thinking the thumping might be from a skunk, I went in the house for a flashlight and saw the skunk, by the light of that flashlight, digging up grubs from the lawn.
     One morning in February a few years ago, I saw a skunk bumbling along the edge of a hedgerow.  That time of year is their breeding season and I thought the skunk might have been a male looking for a mate or two. 
     Several years ago, I helped lead van tours, one per season, in Lancaster County Central Park to see wildlife at night.  We saw several white-tailed deer, a few cottontail rabbits, and an occasional red fox, raccoon, opossum or skunk.  Some of those animals were close to the van which offered the passengers good looks of them. 
     In more recent years, I occasionally travel across cropland at night between New Holland and Ephrata, and I have seen three skunks here and there along the farmland roads I drove on.  All the skunks were digging into roadside shoulders in search of mice, invertebrates, berries and other edibles.  I drove by them slowly to see them better, and to not hit them with my car.
     And last summer we had two skunks on our lawn in New Holland.  One of them sprayed our Jack Russell terrior while that fiesty little dog was in the process of killing the skunk.
     Striped skunks are adaptable and live in a variety of habitats in Pennsylvania, including in farmland, lawns and woods.  They shelter in groundhog holes, stone walls, brush piles and in and under fallen logs.  But they also hang out in barns and under sheds.  And they will eat most anything, anywhere.  Skunks spray a smelly musk on other animals and people when they are alarmed.  And rather than being brown or gray which would camouflage them, they are black with white stripes, though those stripes vary in size.  That black and white-striped pattern on skunks will be remembered by animals sprayed by skunks.  And those animals will stay away from the next black and white-striped creatures they see.  That pattern on skunks is a defense.
     Skunks are interesting critters, but ones to stay away from.  They are adaptable and live commonly throughout much of North America.  They don't want trouble, but will defend themselves when they have to. 

Late-October Farmland

     One afternoon toward the end of this October, I stopped at an open woodlot/pasture in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland because I saw the white flashing of wings on a pair of adult red-headed woodpeckers as they flew from tree to tree on the edge of that small woods.  Red-heads, with red feathering covering their entire heads and necks, and black and white body plumage, are striking to see in their habitats of open woodlots and meadows with lots of large trees, a couple of them dead.  Red-heads chip nurseries out of the dead trees to raise young in summer.
     While watching those beautiful woodpeckers, and a little group of eastern bluebirds eating poison ivy berries on the edge of the meadow, I noticed there were several each of red maple, pin oak, shag-bark hickory and black walnut trees in that woodlot/pasture that straddled a stream of clear water.  The beautiful maples and oaks both had red leaves, while the foliage of the hickories was bronze-yellow.  The hickories also have strips of shaggy bark, each one of which peels up at both ends but is still attached by its middle to the tree, giving hickory bark a shaggy appearance.  Though bare of leaves, the black walnuts still had some green-husked nuts hanging on their twigs.  And there were many hickory nuts, some of them crushed by passing vehicles, lying on the rural road I was on where it passed under tall hickory trees.  Only the nut-storing gray squirrels have jaws strong enough and teeth sharp enough to chew through the husks and shells of walnuts and hickory nuts to get the meat inside each nut.  And all this was lovely symbols of late October in Lancaster County.
     I spent about two hours driving from place to place in a northern part of the county, near a line of low, wooded hills.  The landscape in this farmland is hilly and rocky, and the soil is red, causing less than ideal cropland.  But that same rough geology creates wildlife habitats because much of the land is let go to overgrown, weedy fields, hedgerows, roadside shoulders, woodlots and meadows.
     Weedy fields have several kinds of tall weeds and grasses that are loaded with seeds in autumn through winter, including pigweed, lamb's quarters, pokeweed, velvetleaf, milkweeds and foxtail grass. The leaves and stems of pigweed, lamb's quarters and poke turn red in fall and foxtail grass foliage is yellow in October.  Field mice and a small variety of sparrows inhabit those fields in autumn and winter and eat the seeds of the weeds and grasses. 
     In fall, hedgerows between fields, and roadsides, are red with the leaves of poke, staghorn sumac trees, white oak trees, Virginia creeper vines and the berries of multiflora rose and Tartarian honeysuckle bushes.  Some white oaks are massive, and loaded with acorns that gray squirrels, eastern chipmunks, American crows and blue jays consume.  And hedges are yellow with shag-bark hickory foliage, and orange and yellow with poison ivy leaves and bittersweet berries.  Poke, sumac, creeper, rose, honeysuckle, poison ivy and bittersweet berries are eaten by mice, squirrels and several kinds of birds, including American robins, eastern bluebirds and cedar waxwings.   
     That afternoon, I stopped at a hedgerow that was "loaded" with birds of a few species, including several robins, a half-dozen bluebirds, a few each of blue jays and yellow-rumped warblers, and one each of red-bellied woodpecker and northern flicker.  Most of those pretty birds were busily ingesting red multifora rose and Tartarian honeysuckle berries, or flitting from bush to bush.
     Woodlots are strikingly beautiful, including in autumn, with large trees of various kinds.  Some of the trees are the species mentioned above, plus hackberry and red juniper trees, and sycamore, crack willow, white ash and silver maple trees along streams.  Junipers grow berry-sized, light-blue, fleshy cones that are decorative in the green foliage of those evergreens.  Several kinds of birds eat the cones and pass the seeds far and wide, thus spreading the species across the countryside.  Some of the trees in woodlots and hedgerows are majestically large, helping make this patch of second-rate farmland prettier than intensely cultivated fields with better soil in flatter terrain; but with few, if any, woodlots and hedgerows.         
      The beauties of this farmland in rough terrain were a joy to see.  The colored leaves and berries, variety of plants and birds were enjoyable and inspiring close to home.  Most people throughout the world don't have to travel far to see the beauties of nature.