Humans Benefit Wildlife

     Many kinds of wildlife benefit from human-made habitats, practices and materials.  For a couple of hours in the early afternoon of January 30, 2017, I drove and walked along a few country roads through a bit of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland in search of whatever was visible in nature.  I was stopped by a mixed flock of about 30 turkey vultures and black vultures rising from the crest of a harvested cornfield that was near a long chicken house.  The turkey vultures soared gracefully and effortlessly, as they always do.  But the black vultures soared briefly, flapped their wings rapidly as if in a panic, then sailed again, as is their way.  Although I didn't see the dead bodies because of the hill in that field, I assumed the vultures were eating deceased and discarded chickens in that field, which their kinds always do.  And later that day, I learned in discussion with a local man that sometimes several magnificent bald eagles also scavenge dead chickens in that field on a chicken farm.
     Dead chickens, caste away in fields to be rid of them, are big business to a variety of scavenging critters in Lancaster County cropland, particularly in winter.  Two kinds of vultures, bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, American crows, red foxes, raccoons and other species benefit from those discarded farm birds.
     As I watched the elegant turkey vultures and amusing black vultures in flight, I couldn't help but notice a group of about a dozen rock pigeons powering, and wheeling several times across the sky and eventually settling on the harvested corn field, not to ingest dead chickens, but rather to consume waste corn kernels on the ground.  These attractive pigeons, and many of their kin throughout the world, are wild birds on their own.  Wild pigeons in Lancaster County cropland get food of grain and seeds from farm fields, gather to rest on top of silos where they are relatively safe during days, and roost at night, and raise young, in several broods of two per clutch through the warmer months, in barns and under bridges.
     Rock pigeons originally nested on Mediterranean Sea cliffs, which is why these birds are, traditionally, gray.  Europeans domesticated those wild birds for meat and eggs and European  colonists brought pigeons to North America when they came here to live and farm.  Some of those feathered transplants escaped captivity and have been a wild species since.
     As I watched the vultures and pigeons, I saw an American kestrel perched on a roadside wire about 50 yards down the road.  Looking at that little falcon with 16 power binoculars, I noticed it was holding a dead field mouse in one powerful foot and tearing off chunks of mouse meat with its sharp, curved beak.  The roadside wires and the kestrel were above a hundred-yard-long, seven-foot-tall bank of soil that was riddled with several mouse holes and a few wood chuck burrows.  A harvested corn field planted to winter rye extended back from the top of that roadside bank, a field where the mice could get corn kernels to eat. 
     Although the chucks probably were still sleeping down their tunnels when I was along that stretch of rural road, the mice would have been active and searching for food, mostly at night, though during the day as well, which is why the kestrel caught at least one of them. 
     Field mice use roadside banks to live because the vegetation on them is sometimes mowed, but not plowed, allowing these little rodents to become established on the banks.  And the kestrel used the wires above the bank as a perch to watch for mice. 
     The rodents ate corn and some of those mice were caught and ingested by the little raptor.  This is another example of a roadside food chain.
     Driving about a half mile down the road from the vultures and kestrel, I saw a chubby muskrat run a short distance across a winter rye field, scramble into a watery, roadside ditch and disappear into a concrete pipe under the road I was on.  I suspect the muskrat lives in that pipe under the road, which is a substitute for the tunnels they dig into stream banks at the normal water level, then up to just under the grass roots level.  I remembered a few years ago, one late afternoon early in February, seeing a big, male raccoon enter a female coon's home in a larger pipe under another country road.
And I recalled seeing a striped skunk emerging at dusk from a drainage pipe under a street in a small town where I once lived. 
     Many kinds of creatures live in human-made constructions that shelter them in built habitats, if those species of wildlife are adaptable, and most of them are.  These species take advantage of and benefit from the habitats, materials and practices we create and use to serve ourselves.  The above examples are just a few from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  There are innumerable others throughout the world.