Winter Along Mill Creek

     For two hours each afternoon on January sixteenth and January seventeenth of this month, I drove through farmland to various places along Mill Creek in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to see what wildlife was evident.  I did the second tour because snow fell during the morning of the seventeenth and I wanted to see again what affect it had on wildlife.
      On the sixteenth, I saw many rock pigeons perched on the tops of several silos in barn yards, which is their customary resting places.  Pigeons are beautiful birds originally from Eurasia.  They were brought to the United States as domestic birds, but many pigeons escaped and became feral.  Today flocks of wild pigeons in Lancaster County eat corn kernels and other grains and weed and grass seeds in the fields.  And they roost and raise young in silos and barns, under bridges, and on stone quarry walls, all of which  are human-made structures.  They are a major part of Lancaster County's farmland.
     Adult pigeons are preyed on by Cooper's hawks and peregrine falcons.  And some of their eggs and small young are eaten by American crows, black vultures and other predatory creatures.
     Driving on during the first afternoon, I noticed a couple hundred Canada geese in a harvested corn field near Mill Creek, where they were ingesting corn kernels lying on the ground.  I know from past experience that these geese winter on a slow stretch of Mill Creek, but fly up into the wind for lift from the water, flock after honking flock, to feed in nearby harvested corn fields.  A few minutes later, group after bugling group of geese float down to the fields, into the wind for better flight control.  When full of food, the Canadas fly back to Mill Creek, using the same flight patterns.
     That same afternoon, I saw several mixed groups of mallard ducks and black ducks resting here and there on Mill Creek, as they do on other waterways and impoundments.  They fly out on whistling wings from the creek, group after group, into the wind for lift, to corn fields to shovel up corn kernels lying in the fields.  Later they wing back to their water refuge to rest and digest.
     I also saw a few other kinds of water-loving creatures along Mill Creek, including a great blue heron, a male belted kingfisher and three muskrats.  The heron and kingfisher were along the creek to catch fish, but the muskrats live in stream bank burrows they dig themselves along Mill Creek and consume grass and other vegetation in bordering pastures.
     Not surprisingly, on the first trip I saw four pairs of stately red-tailed hawks, each pair perched together in its own clump of trees in the cropland I was driving through.  January is the start of the red-tails' nesting season and these pairs were getting ready to court and raise families this spring.              I saw a couple of mixed gatherings of small birds in thickets along Mill Creek.  A song sparrow and a pair of northern cardinals were snuggled into one patch of shrubs and weeds and a song sparrow, three or four cardinals and a few each of dark-eyed juncos and white-throated sparrows were in the other clump of bushes and weeds.  All those birds could find weed and grass seeds to eat among the sheltering shrubbery.  And the song sparrows, as their kind does, could hop along the creek's shores to find and consume invertebrates.
     Two blue jays in a lone tree at the end of a harvested corn field were of interest.  They perched in the tree, but took turns dropping to the corn field, presumably to eat corn kernels.  Jays are mostly woodland birds, but here was two of them feeding in a wide open habitat.
     On the seventeenth, I saw several flocks of horned larks that amounted to a few thousand individual birds in farmland harvested to the ground near Mill Creek.  Those larks were eating bits of corn off the ground where wind blew the two inch cover of snow away.  And they were consuming chewed corn from manure spread on top of the snow.  As usual, the day before, when no snow covered the soil, I saw no horned larks.  They were in the fields, but invisible against the ground and corn stubble.  Snow makes them stand out.
     And on the second afternoon, I saw a few more kinds of wintering birds, here and there along Mill Creek, that I didn't see the first day, including four Wilson's snipe, two American pipits, one killdeer plover and one winter wren.  Locally wintering snipe inhabit the edges of smaller waterways in cow pastures where they poke their long beaks into mud under shallow water to bring up and ingest invertebrates.  But they are not always seen because they are so well camouflaged.  Snow makes them more visible, however.
     The pipits and killdeer were chased out of nearby fields because the snow buried their food. Those two species of birds joined snipe along a section of Mill Creek where they searched for invertebrates on the muddy shores until snow melts in the meadows.
     The winter wren skulked among the roots of trees and shrubs along the edge of Mill Creek.  It was searching for invertebrates to eat.      
     It was interesting to compare the birds seen on those two, back-to-back afternoons along Mill Creek in Lancaster County farmland.  Readers can do the same; just get out and look, most anywhere and most anytime.