History of a Meadow

     Today, May 22, 2018, while driving through Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland, I stopped at a patch of cattails in a grassy meadow made golden with multitudes of buttercup blooms.  I wanted to see red-winged blackbirds and whatever other creatures were among the dead stalks with dark brown seed heads of cattails from last year and their new leaves growing this summer.  Several striking male red-wings were perched on swaying cattail stems to sing their territorial songs.  I saw a couple of female red-wings busily going about their motherly duties.  And I saw several barn swallows sweeping swiftly over the cattail stand, and the pasture in general, as they searched for flying insects to eat.  But I also saw many skunk cabbage plants with their large, broad leaves flourishing under the taller cattails.  I've seen skunk cabbages and cattails growing together before in sunny meadows, but it occurred to me again that this pasture, and others like it in Lancaster County have a readable history.
     Skunk cabbage inhabits soggy bottomlands in woods, but adapts to sunny habitats and survives forest trees being cut away for lumber, and to clear land for European-style farming.  The soil in this bottomland was too wet to plow, so it was planted long ago to grass to be a meadow to graze livestock.  And because a stream has always flowed through this low point of ground, water was readily available in abundance to those same farm animals.
     The presence of skunk cabbage in the low spot of that pasture, as that plant species has been since trees covered the ground, indicates the sunny meadow was carved from woods in a bottomland, probably a couple hundred years ago.  But the sun-loving cattails blew in on the wind as tiny seeds.  Cattail seeds that sprouted on wet ground flourished, but those that landed on drier soil perished.
     The invasive, sun-adapted buttercup plants, that are originally from Eurasia, also moved into that sunny pasture on their own and quickly spread across most of the meadow, creating a scene of golden beauty.  The two-foot-tall, or more, buttercup plants provide cover for wildlife above the shorter pasture grass.  I saw only the heads of a pair of Canada geese who were walking through the grass and buttercups.  But it wasn't until the geese walked into a patch of short grass and no buttercups did I see that they had a brood of goslings walking along between them.
     I saw a pair of beautiful wood ducks in a slow stretch of the stream in that meadow.  Most of the stream was concealed from view by grass, tall buttercups and taller cattails.  But I did see parts of that waterway here and there.  The woodies slowly drifted into view for several seconds, then floated out of view again.
     Several farmers in this county erect wood duck nest boxes for wood duck females to hatch out ducklings.  I know from driving by this pasture in winter that there are a couple of wood duck nest boxes in a clump of young floodplain trees, including crack willows, silver maples and red maples, that had been left to grow in recent years along the waterway in the pasture.  A few each of American robins and purple grackles were in that patch of trees and the meadow, probably because they are raising young in nests among those trees.    
     I also saw a pair each of tree swallows and eastern kingbirds near the stand of trees in that pasture. The swallows and kingbirds were all in the meadow to catch flying insects to consume, each kind in its own way.  Both those species probably were nesting among those trees, the swallows in a tree cavity or a bird box put out by a farmer and the kingbirds among the twigs of a tree in the pasture.
     That meadow had much natural beauty, and some history, which made it inspiring and interesting.  There are other pastures like this one here in Lancaster County, and all of them are intriguing.