Nature Close to Home

     There is a mile and a half strip of country road I frequently drive on through cropland because there is much lovely scenery of farmland, wooded hills and nature to experience the year around, starting only a half mile from home in New Holland, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  Unique habitats along the way include stream-sized Mill Creek that flows through two meadows in different stages of plant succession, another former pasture becoming a woodlot, a ten-acre stand of red junipers, a twelve-acre deciduous woods of mostly larger trees, two grazed meadows studded with large trees and a twelve-acre woods of mostly red maple trees.  All these smaller habitats in a larger farmland environment have sources of food for wildlife.
     Several dozen each of mallard ducks and Canada geese, a few American wigeon ducks, congregate on slower-moving sections of Mill Creek in winter.  They eat tender grasses and other plants on the shores of that stream.  Meanwhile, a wintering and majestic great blue heron wades that waterway to catch minnows, dace and white suckers that live in it.  Sometimes, in fall, I might see a stately great egret stalking small fish in that waterway.  These two members of the heron family, and a resident pair of red-tailed hawks that perch on a dead tree in the pasture, also catch and consume meadow mice that live among the grass roots of the meadow.  The herons and egrets dip those mice in water to slick their fur to make swallowing them easier.      
     One meadow Mill Creek flows through, and I see from the road, is beautiful in summer with many blooming blue vervain plants with lavender flowers and lots of swamp milkweeds with pale-pink blooms.  Those lovely blossoms are visited by a variety of bees and butterflies sipping nectar from them, pollinating them in the process.
     Another meadow, across the road from the first, and straddling Mill Creek, is overgrown with crack willow trees, red-twig dogwoods, and a variety of grasses and flowering plants, including lots of spotted jewelweeds with orange flowers in September and asters with pale-lavender blooms in October.  The dogwoods provide berries for rodents, northern mockingbirds, American robins, cedar waxwings and other kinds of berry-eating birds in autumn and winter.  The grasses and flowering plants furnish lots of small seeds for song sparrows, American goldfinches, house finches, northern cardinals and other seed-eating, small birds through winter.  All these permanent resident birds and summering gray catbirds, plus other species of small birds, nest in these streamside thickets.    
     The croplands themselves harbor lots of wildlife the year around.  There often are many butterflies and bees of various kinds on fields of lavender, fragrant alfalfa flowers.  Those fields flutter and shimmer with butterflies, particularly cabbage white butterflies and yellow sulphurs.
     Flocks of rock pigeons, mourning doves, purple grackles, house sparrows and a few other types of birds feed on rye and wheat seeds left on the ground by harvesters in mid-summer.  Those birds make those drab fields more interesting.  And an occasional red-tailed or Cooper's hawk sweeps over the croplands, scaring birds into the air.  Some of the small birds are caught and eaten by those raptors.
     In fall and winter, peregrine falcons and merlins prey on some of those species of birds in the croplands.  Those stream-lined, fast-in-flight raptors can easily catch fleeing birds in mid-air.       
     In winter, Canada geese, mallards, wigeons, pigeons, mourning doves, horned larks and other kinds of birds land in harvested corn fields to shovel up corn kernels left in the fields by automatic harvesters.  These same birds, and other species, also pick chewed, but undigested corn bits out of manure spread on snow across the fields.
     Another former pasture is rapidly succeeding to being a bottomland woods with lots of planted cranberry viburnum along its edges.  Many of the same kinds of vegetation and creatures live in this overgrown meadow as in the first two discussed above.  Strikingly red berries on the viburnums give additional food to berry-eating birds and rodents.
     A ten-acre patch of red juniper trees also has a few each of black walnut, red maple and American holly trees in it.  Those trees provide nuts for gray squirrels, seeds for squirrels and mice and berries for berry-eating birds, and rodents respectively.  And the abundant, evergreen junipers produce berry-like, pale-blue cones that are not only decorative on the trees, but also feed a variety of rodents and berry-eating birds, particularly American robins, that consume those cones as they do berries.
     Little flocks of dark-eyed juncos, house finches and American goldfinches spend winter nights among needled juniper boughs that block cold, winter winds.  By day, those juncos, finches and goldfinches cross the country road to patches of grasses and weeds to ingest the seeds of those plants.     A twelve-acre clump of deciduous woods harbors wood thrushes and eastern chipmunks during the summer, and red-bellied woodpeckers, Carolina chickadees and tufted titmice the year around.  There are other woodland critters in the woods, but those are some of the most noticeable.  And there are lots of colored leaves in that woodland during October when squirrels scurry to collect nuts to store for the winter.
     Two grazed, buttercup-carpeted meadows across the road from each other are studded with black walnut, white oak, pin oak and red maple trees.   Those trees have lovely colored leaves in September and October.
     A pair each of eastern kingbirds, eastern bluebirds and red-headed woodpeckers nest in those meadows, the latter two species in tree hollows.  Early in May, barn swallows come to muddy spots in the pastures to get beaksful of mud to build their mud pellet cradles in nearby barns.  And asters with pale-lavender flowers add more beauty and interest to those pastures in October.
     Near those meadows, a six-acre patch of red maples stands handsomely, especially in September and October when the trees' foliage turns red.  Skunk cabbage and cardinal flower plants dot the grassy floor of this woods/pasture indicating that bottomland was once covered by trees.  Today a few small strips of cattails stand in the moister, sunnier parts of that red maple-dominated habitat.  Robins and bluebirds nest on the maples and get their invertebrate food from nearby pastures.
     Driving along that mile and a half strip of country road is enjoyable and inspiring to me every time the year around.  There is so much nature close to home to see during every season, that those drives don't get boring.