Sunny Summer Evenings

     Nothing in southeastern Pennsylvania is more beautiful and enchanting than sunny summer evenings.  They are the prettiest time of the year.  Green trees, shrubbery, grass and crops are bathed in life-giving, cheering sunlight.  All that lovely greenery is under strikingly blue skies, fluffed with light-gray and white, cumulus clouds.  All this is welcome, relaxing and enjoyable to many people.  And I feel I am in the midst of God when in pretty, peaceful rural areas, soaked in golden sunshine, during sunny summer evenings. 
     I drove through the woods and fields of eastern Lancaster County and northern Chester County, Pennsylvania on the evening of June 27, 2017, as I have many times in the past, to enjoy the sun-filled scenery and whatever wildlife that might be visible.  Groups of peacefully-grazing cattle, horses, sheep and goats dotted many of the meadows.  And some farmers were harvesting grain and baling straw.
     I saw some wildlife as I drove along that evening, including two doe white-tailed deer in their chestnut, summer coats, a couple of wood chucks grazing on grass and other vegetation, a family of eastern bluebirds perched on fence railings and a broad-winged hawk in flight over the road I was on.  And I saw several barn swallows zipping over fields after flying insects to eat and feed to their young perched, here and there, on roadside wires.  
     I stopped along a country road to look at Great Marsh damply sprawled in the distance.  With 16 power binoculars, I saw several kinds of wetland plants, including crack willows, phragmites, cattails, rushes, reed canary-grass, pickerel weeds with their many purple flowers, and bull lilies.  Several male and female red-winged blackbirds, that are raising young in that marsh, flew from tall plant to tall plant.  The males were spectacular with their red shoulder patches in contrast with their overall black feathering.  Female red-wings are attractive, too, in their more camouflaged way.  
     A little later, I stopped at a pond close to another rural road and stayed in my car so as to not frighten any creatures into hiding.  Stands of tall cattails lined the pond here and there and male and female red-wings swayed on some of them.  A great blue heron was perched on a limb of a large tree near the pond, probably resting and digesting after a meal of fish and frogs.  Within a couple of minutes of my stopping by this pond, I heard the explosive belching and gulping of several green frogs and the low moaning of a few bull frogs.  These frogs were sitting unseen here and there on the shores of the pond as they tuned up for a night's drawing of females of their respective kinds to the water to court and spawn.  And while I was listening to that ancient, primeval frog chorus, I saw the head of a painted turtle poked above the surface and a northern water snake swimming along one shore of the pond.
     Later still, as I was driving home just before sunset, I happened upon a scattered flock of a few dozen purple martins, which are a kind of swallow, sweeping and swooping low over a few fields to catch flying insects.  Those martins, as usual, were entertaining to watch, particularly before the setting sun.
     When I got home soon after sunset, male fireflies were climbing up short-grass stems, flashing their abdominal lights and launching themselves into the air, still flickering their lanterns.  These fireflies will repeat their intriguing, entertaining performances evening after evening until around the third week in July.  The use of those insect lanterns will bring the genders together for mating.
     While fireflies were rising from the grass, a few bats performed aerial ballets in the darkening sky over our neighborhood.  The bats fluttered and dove, turning this way and that, in their hot pursuit of flying insects to catch and ingest.  Interestingly, the bats hear the squeaks they constantly emit bouncing off flying insects with their built-in sonar, giving the bats a mental picture of where the insects are.
     No time of year is more beautiful or enchanting than sunny summer evenings in the country.  If the reader needs times of peace, comfort and solace, try enjoying summer evenings, and any other part of nature, any time of the year.  Nature heals.