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.