Roadside Flowering Toughs

     As I did errands on April 26, a couple days ago here in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, I saw many beautiful bouquets of wild flowers, in abundance, along country roads.  All those species of tough, adaptable flowering plants are from Eurasia, except one.  In Eurasia, these types of vegetation adapted to agriculture and other human activities before being accidentally introduced to North America by European colonists.
     All those plants form lovely, mixed carpets or patches of themselves.  And all offer cheery, lovely colors that promote enlightenment of human emotions as one rides through cropland in spring.
     These hardy plants flourish along roadsides because those sunny, human-made habitats are mowed occasionally, but not cultivated, allowing the plants to become established.  They blossom from late March through May, but not all at once.  These flowering plants are, in arbitrary order of blooming, Veronicas, purple dead nettles, dandelions, grape hyacinths, ground ivy, and common blue violets, the only native species in this grouping.
     Each prostrate Veronica plant has a few tiny, pale-blue flowers.  But hundreds of those blooms together make attractive rugs of color on roadsides, fields and lawns from late March into May.
     A kind of mint, each purple dead nettle stands a few inches tall and has heart-shaped leaves that overlap like shingles and a little cluster of small, pink blossoms on top of its stem.  Great carpets of this species make some roadsides and bare-ground fields pink through April and into May.  
     The abundant common dandelions are the most obvious and cheery of these alien species of vegetation along roadsides and on lawns.  Dandelions have yellow blossoms that are each a little more than an inch across, and attractive peeking from green grass and other foliage on the ground of roadsides, meadows and lawns from mid-April into early May.
     Often more than a foot tall along roadsides, all parts of dandelions are edible to various kinds of wildlife.  White-tailed deer, wood chucks and cottontail rabbits eat their leaves, blooms and flower stems while mice and small, seed-eating birds, including finches and sparrows, consume their seeds in May, making the seed fluff float on the wind without their seed cargoes.  But if not eaten, each seed sails on its white, silky parachute away from the parent plants.  That seed might land on a sunny patch of suitable soil where it can sprout into a new plant.  
     Members of the lily family, grape hyacinths were introduced to the United States by people planting their bulbs in the soil of flower beds and lawns.  Each plant has a few grass-like leaves, and a cluster of lovely, deep-blue, bell-like blooms, that look like a bunch of grapes, on top of a six-inch stem from mid-April into May.  Because their seeds blow on the wind, grape hyacinths escaped cultivation and colonized roadsides, lawns and fields.  Their flowers are most beautiful when mixed with the golden blooms of dandelions.  
     Ground ivy is another type of mint with a pungent scent when its leaves are damaged such as in lawn mowing.  This prostrate species that creeps over the ground of roadsides and lawns has rounded, scalloped leaves and attractive, bluish-purple, small blossoms that peer out from grass and other kinds of vegetation from late April into summer.
     Common blue violets, the only species native to North America in this grouping, have bluish-purple flowers that are nearly an inch across, and heart-shaped foliage.  This violet species forms beautiful bouquets and carpets of blossoms along rural roads and on lawns by the third week in April into May.  Like the blooms of other kinds of roadside, flowering plants, the blossoms of common blue violets enlighten many a human soul.  And violet leaves and flowers are food for chucks, rabbits and deer in this area.
     These wild plants create beautiful, mixed clumps and carpets of pretty blooms of yellow, pink, blue and purple in April and May.  And those flowers are exposed in abundance along country roads where all can see, free.            
    

Adjoining Wildlife Habitats

     For a couple of hours one afternoon in mid-April of this year, I stopped at one of my many favorite nature places close to home in new Holland, Pennsylvania to see what was stirring.  That spot, like many others along quiet country roads, has a few adjoining habitats, including deciduous, bottomland woods along a creek and a couple of short-grass meadows, all surrounded by farmland.
     Red maple trees, bearing red flowers at the time, dominate those bottomland pastures.  And those same meadows also have a few each of ash-leafed maple trees that currently have dangling blooms, river birches with their thin bark curling like scrolls on limbs and trunks, and sycamores with their mottled, light and dark bark.  Those tree flowers and bark add beauty to those pastures in April. 
     The adjacent, riparian woods along the creek are also composed of the above trees, plus pin oaks, shag-bark hickories and other kinds of trees that can tolerate temporary flooding.  Shag-barks are attractive because of the plates of loose bark on their trunks and branches.
     Sweet-scented spicebushes dominate the shrub layer in those woods.  And they make that shrub level yellow with their many tiny flowers in the middle of April.
     The floodplain pastures had some obvious wildlife while I visited.  A killdeer plover and several American robins ran and stopped, ran and stopped over the short grass in search of invertebrates in the soil.  A cautious wood chuck grazed on grass and other plants in one meadow at the edge of the woods, while a beautiful male eastern bluebird dropped from twig perches and caught invertebrates among the grass blades of the meadow.  And a pair of handsome mallard ducks fed on plants in a rain puddle in another pasture.
     The riparian woods along the creek were full of life that afternoon in mid-April.  The floor of the woodland was carpeted by multitudes of cheery, yellow flowers of lesser celandine.  And I saw a few kinds of critters, or signs of them.  A male belted kingfisher perched on twigs hanging over the water while he watched the creek for crayfish and small fish.  A few times he plunged beak-first into the water and pulled out a fish after half of the dives.  A great blue heron flew powerfully and majestically upstream while I briefly watched a pair of stately Canada geese at their nest.  I also saw a pair of lovely wood ducks float downstream and around a bend.  A couple of camouflaged song sparrows flitted and hopped along a thin mud flat on the edge of the creek in their search for invertebrates and seeds, where I also noticed raccoon tracks and muskrat poop and tracks.           
     And, because it is a woodland, I saw a permanent resident red-bellied woodpecker and a downy woodpecker, and a newly arrived yellow-shafted flicker, which is another kind of woodpecker.  Most of the time all three of those woodpeckers were chipping at dead wood to get invertebrates.  I saw the vertically rectangular holes of a pileated woodpecker foraging in dead trees in the past.  And I noticed a Carolina chickadee popping in and out of an old downy woodpecker hole.  Perhaps the chickadee is, or will be, raising young in that shelter.     
     Meanwhile, a red-tailed hawk flew into and out of the woods a couple of times while I was there.  At this time of year it probably has a nursery of young high in a tree in the woods.  And there are a lot of gray squirrels in the woods to feed those young.
     I was not surprised to see a pair of eastern phoebes perching on twigs and flying out after flying insects because there is a small bridge over a tributary stream of the creek in the woods.  The phoebes will soon raise young in a mud and moss nest on a support beam under that little bridge. 
     I also saw a striking pair each of northern cardinals and American goldfinches along the edge of the woods.  These birds were busily eating grass seeds when I saw them.
     And I saw a few migrant palm warblers busily catching flying insects in the woods and a migrant female rusty blackbird walking along the woodland creek in search of invertebrates.  The yellow-bellied, chestnut-capped warblers were pretty, but the blackbird was a treat because her species is uncommon these days.
     I saw a fair number of creatures in the short time I was between the meadows and woods.  They were all attractive and interesting.  And best of all, for them, and us, they adapted to human activities, particularly in the meadows and along the rural road I was on.        

Red Maple Swamps

     I can spot red maple tree swamps in spring by the red of the many maple flowers in their canopies.  And when one examines a red maple swamp closely, other layers of native plant life are evident from the canopy to the woodland floor.
     I visited two red maple swamps within a few miles of each other in southeastern Pennsylvania within a couple of days in mid-April of this year.  The woods floors around those swamps were still brown, but the swamps had much green plant growth in their soil and water.  One swamp is less than a half-acre, while the other one is more than two acres. 
     Red maples dominate the canopies of these two wet woods.  Spicebushes with their tiny, yellow blooms and the red twigs of red-twig dogwoods are common in the shrub levels.  Patches of Canada Mayflower plant foliage cover the ground of the larger wetland, especially around the trunks of the red maple trees.  Moss carpets many of the tree bases in the swamps.  A few winterberry bushes, with some partly shriveled, red berries, are in the smaller wetland.  And lush skunk cabbage leaves and the green shoots of tussock grass dominate the inches-deep water of both wooded swamps.  All this creates a beautiful, enchanting area of clear, shallow water, tree trunks and lush, green plants.
     The bigger wooded swamp hosted three kinds of migrating, attractive warblers the couple of hours I visited it.  They were captivating little birds in charming, enchanted habitats.  I saw a few yellow-rumped warblers near the ground and water where they grabbed insects off the soil and in mid-air.  Some yellow-rumps winter this far north and feed on berries through that harshest of seasons so they seem to migrate earlier than many of their warbler relatives.  Yellow-rumps nest in the trees of Canadian forests. 
     I also saw a few palm warblers that have yellow underparts and rufous caps.  Devout ground feeders, they walked about on the dead-leaf covered ground and fallen limbs at the edges of the shallow water, and in that water a bit, to pick up and ingest small invertebrates, pumping their tails all the while.  Palm warblers nest on the ground in bogs in Canadian forests.  
     And I saw a waterthrush in the larger wetland, though I am not sure which kind.  Also types of warblers, the bulkier waterthrushes are not typical of their large family of birds.  They walk along the edges of water to pick up invertebrates to consume, the northern waterthrushes usually in wooded wetlands and the Louisiana waterthrushes along running brooks and streams in deciduous woods. 
     Both species of waterthrushes walk with a bobbing motion, which I think is a kind of camouflage.  These warblers constantly bob along with the same motion as bits of debris bouncing along the edges of the water, probably fooling would-be predators. 
     Northern waterthrushes raise young in bogs in the northern states and Canada, while Louisiana waterthrushes hatch youngsters in streambanks in the eastern United States.  These closely related warblers reduce competition for nesting sites by hatching offspring in different niches.
      I was thrilled to see those three kinds of lovely warblers in that larger red maple swamp.  And those birds under the pretty canopy of red maple blossoms and among the lush-green of the woodland floor and water plants made that wetland enchanting.                         

Wandering Waxwings

     For about an hour on the afternoon of April 15 of this year, we watched about 40 cedar waxwings picking at the fluffy, yellow-with-pollen catkins of our large, male pussy willow shrub in our suburban lawn.  And when not feeding in that bush, many of the waxwings, at once, were drinking water from our bird bath and a neighbor's outdoor goldfish pond.  I saw flocks of waxwings drink at puddles and pools before like that and wondered why they did that so frequently.  I read an article on the web that waxwings drink often to hydrate themselves when ingesting sugary fruit and berries.  It seemed likely they were consuming sugar along with the materials of the willow catkins, which were available in abundance in our yard.  The waxwings might also have been eating tiny insects in the catkins, as I once saw a small group of ruby-crowned kinglets do in April several years ago. 
     Cedar waxwings, Bohemian waxwings and certain other kinds of birds ingest insects in summer, berries in fall and winter and tree and shrub flowers in spring when berries and insects are not abundant.  In spring, waxwings eat the blossoms of fruit trees, and the catkins of the trees and bushes that bear them.  Waxwings also consume tree sap that drips from wounds in trees early in spring, all of which put sugar in their diets.  But since waxwings wander like gypsies, they really don't damage the woody plants they visit to get food. 
     The cedar waxwings in the pussy willow on our lawn were there about an hour, then they all flew away as a group at once around 4:00 pm, not to return the rest of that day.  But the next afternoon they were back, but not for long.  Soon after they settled in our pussy willow to feed on the catkins loaded with pollen and sugar, they all flew away again in swift flight.  And a couple of seconds later I saw why!  A large Cooper's hawk swept into our lawn in hot pursuit of the waxwings.  And within another second, the waxwings and hawk were out of sight.  But the speed of both species of birds was thrilling to see!
     Cedar waxwings are beautiful little birds.  They are about six inches long, a little bigger than sparrows, and are mostly light brown in color.  But each bird also has a crest, a black bib, a black mask over each eye, red, wax-like structures on the secondary feathers of each wing and a yellow tip to the brown tail.  And they have speedy, straight-forward flight.
     Flocks of cedar waxwings, often a few score or more in a gathering, wander across the countryside like gypsies in winter, stopping here, then there, then another place to feed on berries until the berries are practically all eaten at each spot.  Then the waxwings move on again.  A here today and gone tomorrow thing.  In summer, however, waxwings consume flying insects that they catch on the wing, but they also ingest fruits of the season, such as mulberries and serviceberries in June and July.
     In summer, cedar waxwings form pairs that nest as individual pairs dispersed along creeks and streams shaded by scattered large trees.  Waxwings build shallow cups of twigs and grass among twigs of trees where they hatch and raise young in mid to late summer.  It is then that flying insects, fruits and berries are abundant to feed their young, and themselves.
     It's always a thrill to see the lovely cedar waxwings in large groups in winter, as they eat a variety of berries.  And I was impressed by the waxwings' getting foods from our pussy willow's catkins until chased out by the Cooper's hawk.  Wandering waxwings are wonderful to experience.         
        
          

Local Spring Evenings

     I consider sunny evenings from mid-April to the middle of May to be the most enchanting times of year in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  To me, they are enjoyable and inspiring.  I also appreciate spring evenings in wetlands on woodland edges and around ponds in overgrown meadows the most.  And I hear more wildlife in those lovely habitats at dusk, including the inspiring chorusing of birds and rapturous calling of amphibians, than I see.
     At sunset, I enjoy hearing male American robins and white-throated sparrows singing beautiful courtship songs among young trees and shrubbery.  Robins stay here to nest, but the white-throats will migrate farther north to raise young.  And I am often thrilled to hear a pair or two of loudly honking Canada geese flying over the singing robins and sparrows. 
     While robins and white-throats sing in the gathering darkness, I also listen to the fascinating courtship displays of male American woodcocks, a kind of inland sandpiper.  Each male woodcock exits a wooded bottomland and lands on bare soil in a clearing.  There he vocally "peents" for a minute, then circles upward on rhythmically twittering wings.  At the zenith of his flight, he sings, then drops to bare ground where he performs again and again to attract female woodcocks for mating.
     Meanwhile, male spring peeper frogs peep loudly, male pickerel frogs snore softly and male American toads trill musically, each individual with his throat bulged out to amplify the sound.  All that wonderful, ancient chorusing in wetlands and ponds under the red flowers of red maples in wooded bottomlands attracts females of each species to the water to spawn.
      And when I sit in darkness by a wetland or pond in the woods and listen to the ageless, ethereal concerts of these tailless amphibians, I fancy myself living millions of years ago in the Age of Amphibians, when those creatures ruled the land.  The orchestras of these frogs and toads are entertaining, intriguing and inspiring.
     I also enjoy hearing the lovely, twilight songs of bird species that wintered in Central and South America, but came to bottomland woods in eastern North America, including in Lancaster County, by the end of April, to raise young.  Males of each bird species sing beautifully to establish nesting territories, repel other males of their respective kinds and attract females to themselves to rear offspring.
     Wood thrushes sing mesmerizing, flute-like phrases that sound like "a-o-lee", or "e-o lay", while veeries, another kind of thrush, breezily whistle flute-like songs that repeatedly spiral downward.  Eastern wood pewees solemnly, but beautifully sigh "pee-a-wee" over and over again.  All these birds gently sing as darkness overtakes bottomland woods every evening from late April into early July.  And all these bird songs are soothing to my soul; I am at peace when I hear them in the gathering dusk.         
     I enjoy sunny evenings in April and May.  They are full of pretty and wonderful natural happenings that are pleasing, inspiring and soothing to the human soul.  
           

Woodlot Stream Birds

     I parked along a short stretch of stream in a 20-acre, deciduous woodlot, surrounded by farmland, a mile south of New Holland, Pennsylvania for two hours on the afternoon of April 4, 2018 to see what creatures were visible.  I stop there occasionally in all seasons, but that April day's birding was exceptional.  And each species I saw then, including two song sparrows, one swamp sparrow,  a winter wren, one Louisiana waterthrush, a pair of eastern phoebes and a pair of wood ducks, has reason to be around stream-in-a-woods habitats.  They all are adaptable, inland shoreline birds.  And individuals of each kind are camouflaged, which helps protect them from predators.
     Small waterways and ponds, bordered by thickets of shrubbery and young trees, are a favorite habitat of the abundant, permanent resident song sparrows.  That kind of sparrow finds invertebrate and seed foods in the thickets and along the muddy or gravelly shores of the waters.  And many pairs of this type nest near the water as well.
     Swamp sparrows uncommonly winter in thickets bordering small waters along woodland edges in southeastern Pennsylvania, but hatch young farther north.  Though related to song sparrows, the mostly brown swamp sparrows are a bit more colorful with rufous-red on crowns and shoulders.of their wings.  All winter they scratch for invertebrates and seeds in the muddy shores of small waters, but quickly hide in thickets when they sense danger.
     Warm-brown winter wrens mostly spend winters along the edges of brooks in forests, but some of them have adapted to wintering in woodlots surrounded by cropland.  Therefore, song sparrows that adjusted to farmland and an adaptable winter wren occupy the same section of stream in a little woods in an agricultural habitat.     
     All day, every day in winter, winter wrens scurry like feathered mice along the water's shores and among tree roots and fallen logs as they search for invertebrates in protected niches.  The wrens shelter at night in crevices in streambanks and between exposed tree roots in those banks that block cold wind and protect the wrens from mink.   
     A Louisiana waterthrush, recently arrived from wintering in Central America, bobbed and danced over stones and gravel in the inch-deep shallows of this little, woodland stream while that bird looked for invertebrates under the stones.  Waterthrushes' tendency to bounce as they walk along waterway shorelines is a form of blending in.  They have the same bobbing as bits of bark and other debris bouncing in the current, leading predators to believe that waterthrushes are just more stuff floating and dipping up and down in the water.  
     A pair of adaptable waterthrushes might stay to nest in a bank along this woodland stream.  But maybe the woodland isn't big enough to suit them.      
     A pair of overall-gray eastern phoebes perched on twigs over the stream to watch for flying insects to flutter by.  When prey is spotted, each phoebe sallies out after it, grabs it in its beak and returns to a perch to swallow its victim whole. 
     A pair of phoebes is in this woodlot every summer because of a small bridge that carries vehicles over the stream in the woods.  The phoebes build a mud and moss nursery on a support beam under the bridge which protects the young from weather and most predators.  Parents feed their young flying insects they catch on the wing. 
     A pair of beautiful wood ducks swam quickly downstream while I was along that little waterway in the woodlot.  By this time the hen should be laying eggs in a tree cavity, of which there are several in this woodlot.  But that female woody probably is not ready to set on her eggs until her clutch is complete.  That way all ducklings hatch the same day and follow their mother as one group. 
     Woodies nest in tree hollows and nest boxes erected for them in woodlands and woodlots near streams and ponds.  When hatched, ducklings creep up to the exit, leap to the water or ground below and follow their mothers to water, where they feed on aquatic invertebrates to get protein for growth.     These are woodland and thicket birds adapted to a woodlot in farm country for nesting, or just feeding while wintering or on migration.  And they feed in different niches, which reduces competition for food among the species, allowing them all to be in that woodlot at the same time.  But there is some overlap for resources among these birds in that remnant woodland habitat in Lancaster County farmland.   

Pectorals and Pipits

     On April 2, 2018, I saw on the internet that someone spotted pectoral sandpipers, and a few other species of shorebirds, in a soggy meadow in southeastern Pennsylvania.  I thought, "yes, pectorals should be in local pastures by now and through April.  For a few hours that same morning, I drove through Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland to look for pectoral sandpipers and other critters in meadows, especially pastures with puddles of standing water from snow melt and recent rain.
     I stopped at a pond about as big as a small barn, but only inches deep, that was used for ice skating.  I looked for pectorals along its grassy shores, but found two Wilson's snipe and two killdeer plover, both well camouflaged, and still here from winter.  And I saw several each of recently arrived American robins and purple grackles on the short grass around that open-water pond.  Those four species of birds were looking for earthworms and other kinds of invertebrates in the grassy niches they were occupying.
     I also saw a few each of robins, grackles and starlings, and a killdeer and a snipe in a puddle in a field across the country road from that skating pond.  They, too, were looking for invertebrates emerging from the ground to avoid drowning.  I could plainly see the snipe rapidly pushing its beak up and down in mud under inch-deep water to get food.
     Moving on, I saw other partly-flooded meadows, each with a few robins, starlings, grackles and red-winged blackbirds wading in inch-deep water to ingest invertebrates.  A killdeer or two were also in some of them, picking invertebrates from the surfaces of mud and water.  A half-dozen tree swallows with iridescent-blue tops and white bellies, fluttered and careened over one flooded field as they caught and consumed flying insects on the wing. 
     At another wet meadow by a lonely rural road, I saw several striking male red-wings, some of them perched on scattered sapling trees where they repeatedly flashed the red feathers on each wing and sang their "konk-ga-ree" songs to establish nesting territories.  And I noticed a couple of beautifully-furred muskrats swimming in the pasture brook on errands unknown to me.
     I stopped at another partially-flooded meadow by a country road.  There I saw about 80 attractive ducks of four species and both genders, including mallards, black ducks and American wigeons left-over from winter and recently-arrived green-winged teal in a farmer's meadow.  I don't think I ever saw such a variety of ducks in an unprotected, short-grass pasture as I did that day.  The ducks of those four kinds were intermingled among each other as they walked about and shoveled up aquatic vegetation and invertebrates from the pools, and mud and short grass among those puddles.
     There also were several handsome robins, and a few each of grackles, starlings and red-wings feeding on invertebrates in the same puddles.  And there was a killdeer, two pectoral sandpipers and a few sparrow-sized American pipits among those pools in that same meadow!  They, too, were looking for invertebrates to eat.  The pectorals were recent arrivals here, but the pipits were in local fields and pastures all winter, especially around little trickles and rivulets of clear, running water.
     Both Arctic tundra nesters, migrant pectorals and wintering pipits overlap each other here in April, as well as on open ground across the United States.  Both are brown with darker markings, which camouflages them on bare ground and soil with sparse vegetation.
     Interestingly, pectorals have habits similar to those of snipe, including settling among puddles and rivulets in short-grass meadows and harvested fields that are mostly bare in April when pectorals pass through here between wintering grounds in South America and breeding territories on the tundra.  I was happy to see all the creatures I did that day, but especially to spot pectoral sandpipers and pipits in the same pasture.   
    

Under Maple Flowers

     Red maple trees, both wild and planted, have a charming, dark-red blush among their twigs by the end of March in southeastern Pennsylvania.  That beautiful, interesting red is from the innumerable buds that are swelling and will soon burst into flowers, creating their own brand of beauty on short-grass lawns and in the canopies of wooded bottomlands.  And for a couple of weeks in April, those red blossoms partly shade a few kinds of blooms and creatures living under them.
     Scilla, Veronicas and purple dead nettles, all common, flowering plants native to Eurasia, also bloom from late March into April on lawns in this area, many of them under red maple blossoms.  Scilla grows from bulbs planted on lawns and in flower beds and has pleasing, sky-blue blooms.  Patches of Veronica have tiny, pale-blue flowers and carpets of dead nettle have pink ones.  Both those alien plants sprout on lawns without help from us.  In fact, many people consider them to be weeds and try to eradicate them.  To me, however, Scilla, Veronicas and dead nettles growing among grass and adding beauty to lawns are as much lovely wild flowers as native wildflowers growing and blooming on forest floors.     
     And when red maples start blooming, obvious groups of handsome American robins and iridescent purple grackles are already moving across short-grass lawns, many of them under attractive red maple flowers, in quest of earthworms and other invertebrates to eat, adding more beauty and intrigue to flower-dappled lawns into April.  Some of those robins and grackles will stay on lawns to raise young, the robins in the relative safety of deciduous shrubbery and sapling trees and the grackles in half-grown coniferous trees that have densely-layered limbs of needles that offer great shelter.  By rearing offspring in different niches, robins and grackles reduce competition between them for nesting sites and both species can hatch young in the same lawns.
     Wild red maples mostly inhabit wooded bottomlands that always have moist soil.  The lovely blooms of those maples in the canopies shadow flowering plants and animals that live on the damp floors of bottomland woods, including native trout lilies, alien lesser celandine and grape hyacinth from Eurasia, and native spring peeper frogs and American toads.    
     Large patches of lesser celandines and trout lilies have yellow flowers that brighten woodland floors along streams and wetlands.  And grape hyacinths have purple blooms which offer lovely contrasts to the yellow blossoms among lush, green plants on the damp ground.
     Spring peepers are a kind of small tree frog.  Males of this species peep loudly in ponds and swamps in bottomland woods on warm nights and rainy days from the latter part of March through April.  Male American toads trill musically from early April to the third week of that month in those same pools that peepers peep in, often both those tailless amphibians calling at once.  That peeping and trilling by male peepers and toads, with throats bulging out to amplify their calls, attract females of their respective kinds to mates for spawning eggs in water, often under the lovely roof of red maple blossoms.    
     The peeping and trilling of male peepers and toads, in unison, at dusk and into the night, create ethereal choruses reminescent of the long ago age of amphibians.  I often sat in the dark by a woodland pool or wetland and imagined myself in that distant time when amphibians ruled the land.
     Red maple blossoms, and the flowers, birds and calling amphibians living under them, add beauty and intrigue to lawns and wooded bottomlands.  And they help indicate spring arrived!