A Bottomland Meadow

     There is a bottomland meadow in farmland in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, studded here and there with a variety of large, floodplain trees, that I visit now and again to experience nature.  For a couple of hours in the afternoon of September first, I stopped at that cow pasture to once again enjoy nature.  As I pulled off the country road, I again admired the one or two each of big sycamore, white oak, pin oak, black walnut, river birch, honey locust, red maple, white ash and crack willow trees that shade parts of the meadow and provide food and shelter for wildlife.  Gray squirrels and white-tailed deer from nearby woods come into this meadow to eat some of the acorns and other seeds from some of these trees. 
     Although most of this pasture is covered by short grass for livestock to graze on, there also are patches of tall grass here and there.  Many of those high grasses, such as foxtail grass, are loaded with seeds that mice and seed-eating birds will eat this winter.
     But it was the variety and abundance of flowering plants that caught my attention the most during those two hours.  Flower highlights included patches of tall, bushy spotted jewelweeds with their orange, cornucopia-shaped blooms in sunny niches, their close relatives and look-alikes pale jewelweeds that grow yellow blossoms in shaded spots, New York ironweeds with their hot-pink flowers, great lobelias, and lots of it, that have bluish-purple blooms, Asiatic dayflowers that produce blue blossoms, clumps of tall smartweeds with pink blooms and scatterings of knotweeds with tiny, white flowers.  All these flowering plants begin to bloom late in summer, adding to the beauties of plants that flower before them in meadows and along rural roadsides.  Migrating ruby-throated hummingbirds dip their long beaks into jewelweed and lobelia flowers to sip sugary, energy-giving nectar.  Interestingly to me, the blooms of Asiatic dayflowers look like the face of Mickey Mouse.  The two blue petals resemble Mickey's ears and the yellow stamens together are his nose.
     Several each of bumble bees, carpenter bees and silver-spotted skipper butterflies also visited the jewelweed and lobelia blooms to sip nectar, pollinating those attractive blossoms in the process.  Those insects add more life and beauty to the meadow late in summer.
     I saw other kinds of interesting insects in that meadow.  Small, dark field crickets seemed to be everywhere at the base of the grasses and on the road by the pasture.  American grasshoppers and red-legged grasshoppers jumped away through the grass when I walked on the road along the edge of the pasture.  A couple of striking monarch butterflies fluttered low over the meadow and visited ironweed flowers to suck up nectar.  Those monarchs might be of the generation that will migrate south to Florida or Mexico ahead of the coming winter.  And I saw three orange and chocolate least skipper butterflies fluttering together in a clump of tall grasses.
     I also saw two large, black and yellow garden spiders, each in her own big, orb web about ten feet apart on a fence railing.  Those spiders, as a species, are quite pretty, as is their webbing used to snare invertebrates.  While I watched, one garden spider ran down her web to attack a wasp that got caught in it.  But that strong insect broke away from the web before the spider got a good grip on it to paralyze it.
     And I noticed a male eastern bluebird perched in one of the trees and watching for passing insects to grab in its beak and consume.  This bluebird and its mate may have raised a couple of broods of young in a tree cavity in this cow pasture.
     A song sparrow moved about the gravelly shores of a brook in its search for invertebrates and seeds to ingest.  That bird was hard to see because of its being brown in a brown habitat.
     The most interesting vertebrate I saw that afternoon was a half-grown northern water snake that was basking in sunlight on top of a pile of sticks dumped along the side of the brook by high water in the past.  I almost didn't see that snake at all because of its excellent camouflage.
     Though this meadow is grazed by livestock in farm country, it has its wild moments, too.  One can spot many kinds of critters just by quietly, patiently watching for it in almost any habitat, both wild and human-made.  And by watching closely, even the smallest natural happenings are noticed.