Yesterday, October 31, 2017, I went to Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania to enjoy the sunlight, cool breezes and colored leaves of late autumn, and to see what critters were visible in its eight-acre, human-made impoundment, and the upstream, bottomland woods along the stream-sized, woods-flanked Conewago Creek that flows into that lake. Woods-shrouded Conewago Creek parallels Route 117 on one side of that road which runs by Mt. Gretna on a wooded slope on the other side of the road.
I started at the impoundment that was beautifully ringed mostly by red maple trees that had red leaves on October 31, white oak trees with red and brown foliage and an understory of speckled alder bushes. A group of eight Canada geese were standing on a small lawn of short grass on a shore of the lake, while a flock of about 24 mallard ducks floated in shallow water along a shore of that impoundment. The ducks were restless, swimming about from spot to spot on the lake, and I noticed a drake pintail duck and a pair of black ducks swimming with the mallards. The mallards may have been locally-hatched birds, but the pintail and black ducks definitely were migrants.
As I watched the geese and mallards for a few minutes, I saw a belted kingfisher fly from tree to tree and a migrant double-crested cormorant perched on a shoreline tree. Both these birds are catchers of small fish and so make meals of the young bluegill sunfish that live in this lake. Kingfishers snare fish by diving, beak-first, from perches on tree limbs or other shoreline objects, and hovering into the wind on rapidly beating wings and dropping head-first into the water to snatch their prey with their long bills. Cormorants float on the water like ducks and boats, dive under water from the surface, swim with their webbed feet and grab fish in their long beaks.
As I walked into the wooded bottomland from Route 117, I crossed a little, wooden foot-bridge and peered into the water. Their little schools of black-nosed dace, a kind of small, stream-lined fish, swam upstream in alarm of my presence on shore. Green herons, northern water snakes and kingfishers make meals of dace when they are along this creek.
As I walked farther into the bottomland woods, I saw many tall, stately tulip trees, red oaks and white pines. There was still much pretty, colored foliage on the tulip trees and oaks, but there also was a carpet of crunchy leaves from both those trees on the forest floor. That woodland seemed particularly cheery looking because of the yellow tulip tree leaves on the trees and the ground at the same time.
I took a seat near the brook-sized Conewago Creek in a wooded bottomland that had a couple of tiny trickles of water running through it to the creek. There I sat quietly and waited for creatures to show up. As I waited, I saw many tulip tree seeds whirling down in the wind like a beige snowfall. Each seed is able to twirl some distance from its parent tree because of its thin blade, thus spreading the species across the landscape.
I also noticed the red berries on multiflora rose bushes in a little clearing in the woods, on spicebushes in the woodland understory and, especially, on the many winterberry shrubs in that same bottomland understory. All those red berries made that woods very attractive. And the spicebushes even had yellow foliage at the time.
While I sat and watched, I saw a blue jay perched in a tree, while a gray squirrel consumed winterberry berries. And I saw a small group of cedar waxwings fluttering out to catch flying insects in mid-air and return to perches to eat their victims.
A Carolina chickadee, a tufted titmouse, a ruby-crowned kinglet, a few golden-crowned kinglets and a pair of northern cardinals flitted among foliage and fed on tiny insects in the shrub layer of the woods. Meanwhile, a winter wren scurried about on the woodland floor like a feathered mouse. The wren was searching for tiny invertebrates to ingest. The chickadee relatives and the kinglets were camouflaged in their shrub layer, which helps protect them from predators. And the wren, being brown, blends into its niche of brown carpets of fallen leaves on forest floors. And chickadees and kinglets among shrubs don't compete for food with the wren on the ground.
Once again I noticed that many of the little forest birds are not visible for a while. Then, suddenly, there they are at once, scurrying and feeding, only to all suddenly disappear again. Maybe they all come out together to confuse predators. Or one bird may start feeding and the others take that as a sign that all is well and they come out to get food as well.
But the biggest mystery of the day was the dragonfly I saw land on a tiny patch of mud along a leaf-filled trickle in that wooded bottomland. The dragonfly was brown all over, with a lot of green spotting on its thorax and a little green on its abdomen. And it had four clear wings. I thought it to be a female because her abdomen was pushing against the mud as though she was depositing eggs in it. Though I looked through a couple of field guides to insects and the internet to identify her, I could not. But she was pretty and interesting anyway.
I was grateful to have been in a lovely woodland on a beautiful, late-fall day. And the wildlife added more enjoyment and excitement, and a bit of mystery, to the day
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