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.