A Patch of Autumn Beauties

     Today, October 13, 2017, I visited a 50 yard stretch of woodland edge along a country road in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland, initially because I saw beautiful colored leaves and red berries as I drove by.  I stopped a couple of hours to see what else in nature was going on in that little bottomland woods.  

     Though the woodland was mostly green at this date, poison ivy vines crawling up tree trunks on the sunny border of the woods had orange, red and yellow leaflets of three, while Virginia creeper vines on those same trees had red leaflets of five.  And several spicebushes of varying sizes in the shrub level of the woods had yellow foliage, which seemed to brighten the woodland.
     Red berries in the woods edge, including those on spicebushes, Tartarian honeysuckle shrubs and multiflora rose bushes, and the red fruits on a crab apple tree, add color and beauty to the bottomland woods.  Those attractive berries and fruits, and the dull-white berries on poison ivy vines, will be food for rodents, foxes, skunks and other mammals, and berry-eating birds, including American robins, cedar waxwings, starlings and others through the coming winter.  The birds ingest those fruits, digest their pulp, but pass the seeds in their droppings as they fly about, broadcasting those seeds across the countryside.  The plants that sprout from those seeds will grow, mature and eventually feed future rodents, birds and other creatures.       
     I saw a couple of resident gray squirrels in that bottomland woods busily gathering and burying black walnut nuts for winter food.  Each scurrying squirrel had a nut in its mouth every time I saw it through my 16 power binoculars.
     I saw two wary and camouflaged female wood ducks on the slower part of a stream flowing through the edge of the woods by the road I was on.  I surprised them as much as they did me, causing those ducks to scoot out of sight under tree limbs hanging over the waterway.  Those woodies may have hatched young along that stream (there's several tree hollows in that woodland).  Or they might be migrants that stopped on that stream in the woods to rest and feed on seeds and aquatic vegetation.
     I saw a few species of small birds during the two hours I observed that woodland.  And, as usual, there were few birds to be seen at first, then a flurry of feathered activity, and finally, few birds again.  One must often be in the right place at the right time to see birds. 
     As might be expected in a woodland, I saw one each of red-bellied and downy woodpeckers and one northern flicker, which also is a kind of woodpecker.  All these woodpeckers, as their family is inclined to do, get invertebrate food by chipping into dead wood.  And they raise young in tree cavities.  But flickers also get much of their food on the ground, in the form of ants.  Flickers are mostly brown instead of black and white like most woodpeckers so they will blend into the ground as they feed on ants in the soil.
     I saw a few species of permanent resident, woodland birds in that woods, including a few Carolina chickadees and tufted titmice and a couple of blue jays.  The chickadees and titmice were fluttering about and feeding on tiny insects on leaves, bark and in the air.  The jays came to the stream to drink and bathe in the shallows.
     I also saw three kinds of migrant birds, including an eastern phoebe that was consuming poison ivy berries and a little, mixed flurry of pretty golden-crowned and ruby-crowned kinglets.  The tiny kinglets, like the chickadees were flitting among the leafy tree boughs in pursuit of minute invertebrates.  Kinglets are difficult to identify because they seldom are still long enough to find through binoculars.             
     This was one two-hour period of time I spent in a small woods near home.  One doesn't have to go far to find ample beauties and intrigues in nature in all seasons.  Just get out and look for them.