A May Meadow

     Many meadows in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania are pretty and interesting, human-made habitats.  They are carpeted with grass, dotted with scattered trees, patched here and there with shrubbery, and have a brook or stream running through them.  Those cow pastures, therefore, are habitats for a variety of adaptable wildlife, including several kinds of birds during summer.
     On sunny May 10, 2017, I visited a lovely meadow close to home to experience what plants and animals were visible in it, as I have done at times in the past.  Since no livestock have been grazing in it this year so far, the grass was more than two feet high and growing.  Patches of beautiful, golden buttercup flowers were everywhere in it.  And I saw several species of birds during the hour I watched that pasture.
     I saw a pair each of striking Baltimore orioles and handsome eastern kingbirds because of the tall trees in that pasture, the orioles high in a tree and the kingbirds perched on two different fence posts.  The female oriole will build a deep basket of vines and grasses, attached to a few outer twigs on a limb high in a lone tree.  The oriole pair will feed their young a variety of invertebrates they pick off the trees, other vegetation and the ground.
     Kingbirds perch on fences, trees and tall weeds and grasses to watch for flying insects passing by their lookouts.  When prey is spotted, each kingbird flutters out after it, catches it in its beak and returns to its perch to eat its victim.  The female kingbird will make an open cup nursery of small twigs and grass on twigs inside the foliage of a lone tree in the meadow.  And the kingbird pair will feed flying insects to their youngsters.
     Because of a couple of dead, but still-standing, trees in that meadow, I saw a pair each of striking red-headed woodpeckers and pretty northern flickers, each pair working on a nesting cavity in each of the dead trees.  Neither kind of woodpecker is common in Lancaster County because of habitat loss and competition for nesting hollows in dead trees with starlings, an aggressive bird species originally from Europe.
     Red-heads have completely red heads, white bellies and black wings with a white patch on each wing.  They peck into bark and wood after invertebrates like all woodpeckers do, but red-heads also fly out after flying insects.
     Flickers, unlike other woodpeckers, which are mostly black and white, are mostly brown because of their inherited habit of eating ants from ant hills on the ground.  And, interestingly, both these kinds of woodpeckers, unlike their relatives, prefer open country with some trees rather than woodlands with their dense growths of trees.
     Because of abandoned woodpecker holes in the dead trees and in dead limbs in live trees in that cow pasture, I saw a pair each of eastern bluebirds and tree swallows in that meadow.  Bluebirds and tree swallows compete mightily for nesting cavities in trees and wooden fence posts, and bird boxes erected particularly for them.  I think each species is lovely in appearance and disposition so I have no preference to which species wins the nesting holes.  But since both species are successful in being common, they each must be winning enough hollows to raise adequate numbers of offspring.  Bluebirds and tree swallows both eat invertebrates in pastures, the former species off plants and the ground and the latter from the air while in flight.
     I saw a northern mockingbird in a patch of multiflora rose shrubbery in the pasture.  And I am sure that mocker had a mate somewhere nearby.  The mockers will build a twig and grass cradle in that clump of rose bushes where they will hatch babies and feed them a variety of invertebrates.
     Some taller and growing grasses and cattails along the brook in that meadow attracted at least a couple of male red-winged blackbirds who swayed on top of that vegetation and repeatedly sang their "kon-ga-ree" songs to attract female red-wings to them for mating and raising young.
     And while looking at those handsome male red-wings along that tiny, shallow waterway, I saw four other species of birds that, to me, were the highlight of visiting that grassy pasture.  At first, I noticed up to five male barn swallows at a time repeatedly circling low over a patch of mud by the brook, then dropping to it.  Through binoculars, I saw them pick up bits of mud with their beaks as other birds pick up grain and fly away with those loads of mud.  Those males each made trip after trip to the mud and carried it back by the bill-full to their nest sites in a barn, or barns, where, presumably, their mates were using those mud pellets to make mud pellet cradles plastered to support beams under the ceilings of those barns.
     Meanwhile, back at the mud, I saw four fluffy, stilted killdeer chicks walking on the mud and in the shallows of the running brook to ingest invertebrates.  They blended into their surroundings so well that they were hard to see with the naked eye.    
     A female American robin was also collecting mud in her beak to use to line her nearby nursery in a bush or young tree.  She also made trip after trip to get the mud she needed.
     And two lesser yellowlegs waded in the brook to catch aquatic worms and insects before continuing their migrations to the boreal forests of Canada to nest on the ground near lakes.  They may have wintered as far south as South America.
     Several interesting species of birds were visible in that meadow on May 10.  I went home inspired, having enjoyed every second of that trip to a human-habitat close to home.