February migrants

     I saw a few hundred Canada geese in a large, harvested corn field as I was driving along a country road in eastern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland on February 23, 2018.  I stopped to watch the geese for a few minutes and noticed about a half dozen snow geese, with some of the Canada geese, on top of a small rise.  Thinking there could be more snow geese on the other side of that little hill, I drove to another rural road to see the geese from a different angle.  I counted 72 snow geese among more Canada geese in a shallow depression in that field.  All the geese of both species were resting when I saw them, but they probably had been feeding earlier on corn kernels.
     All winter I have been seeing flocks of Canadas most everywhere in Lancaster County cropland where they've been feeding on corn and the green shoots of winter rye.  But I'm sure other groups of Canada geese have recently arrived here from farther south and joined their locally over-wintering relatives in local fields to ingest vegetable matter.  And at this time, too, there are many thousands of snow geese resting and feeding at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area.  The geese have seen the increasing periods of daylight each succeeding day and are restless to push north to their Arctic tundra breeding territories. 
    While watching the geese, I saw rivers of ring-billed gulls flowing across the sky, dropping like feathered waterfalls to the same corn field and a bordering rye field, and landing lightly on the ground.  There the gulls ate invertebrates emerging from the soil in the warm, wet weather and light rainfall.  Occasionally, a mass of gulls rose from the ground like a bed sheet being lifted by one corner, swirled over the fields a couple of times, then landed again where they rose just a minute ago.
     Many of these ring-bills had been feeding on edible garbage at nearby landfills all winter, but are now taking invertebrates from the fields.  And now those wintering gulls are being joined by relatives from Delaware and Chesapeake Bays and the Atlantic seacoast. 
     As I sat in my car along that lonely country road, I saw great, mixed masses of noisy blackbirds swarming over the fields and landing in that same harvested corn field the geese and gulls were in.  Exciting to see, the blackbirds came down to the field like a downpour of black rain drops.  Tens of thousands of blackbirds, including purple grackles, red-winged blackbirds and brown-headed cowbirds, must have been in those great gatherings that came together in one big horde in that corn field, making a part of that field dark with their tremendous numbers.  But those blackbirds, always restless, constantly shifted to different parts of the corn field and scattered into several smaller gatherings of themselves.  The attractive males and females of each kind walked briskly over dead corn stems and leaves still lying in the field and picked up corn kernels to choke down.  Then, suddenly, all the blackbirds took flight in a great, noisy mass again and disappeared from view in a twinkling.
     Typical of February and March migrants, those handsome geese, gulls and blackbirds, only six kinds in all, made my day.  Their spectacular numbers were thrilling to experience, though I have seen swarms of all those species many times before.  They are a bit of wildness in the human-made, cultivated habitats they adapted to, including farmland, impoundments and suburban areas.  However everyday they may be, those birds, and all of nature, are beautiful, intriguing, welcome miracles of God's nature on Earth.