August's Beauties and Intrigues

     Though generally warm, August in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania has several beauties and intrigues that make life outdoors more interesting.  Daylight each succeeding day gets a couple minutes shorter and cold fronts are more frequent than they were earlier in summer.
     Thousands of local, post-nesting barn swallows and purple martins, which are another kind of swallow, form flocks that swoop low and swiftly across fields after flying insects to eat.  When full, they line up on roadside wires to rest, digest, preen their feathers and socialize.  But when hungry again, off they go to capture more flying insects in their broad beaks.  These swallow species also gather together to drift south to the Caribbean area and northern South America to find insects in abundance during the northern winter.
     Meanwhile, scores and scores of post-breeding killdeer plovers, a type of inland shorebird, gather on recently mowed hay fields to consume a variety of invertebrates from the soil.  They are hard to see on the fields because they are brown on top, which blends them into their human-made habitat.
     A variety of southbound sandpipers that nested on the Arctic tundra or in Canada's forests, depending on the species, stop on mud flats along waterways and impoundments in Lancaster County, as elsewhere across much of the Lower 48 States.  There they fatten up on aquatic invertebrates they pull from the mud and shallow water of those bodies of water before continuing their migrations farther south to find reliable food sources during the northern winter.    
     The small, brown least sandpipers that nested on the tundra and the grey, medium-sized lesser yellowleg sandpipers that raised young along lakes in Canadian forests are the two most common migrant sandpipers in Lancaster County in autumn.  Least sandpipers are brown like the mud they forage on and yellowlegs are grey, which camouflages them better as they wade in shallow water after invertebrates in the water and the mud under it.
     Several kinds of tall, flowering plants have lovely blossoms in wet meadows and along roadsides in August.  Along country roads, the beautiful blue blooms of chickory and the white flowers of  Queen-Anne's-lace seem to reflect partly cloudy skies, patched with cumulus clouds.  Meanwhile, the brilliant-yellow goldenrod blossoms represent the sun in those same blue and white skies.
     And in the low spots in pastures, ironweed has attractive, hot-pink blooms while ten-foot-tall Joe-pye weeds have clusters of dusty-pink blossoms.  The flowers of both these plants attract lots of bees, butterflies and other types of insects that sip their sugary nectar.  The orange, cornucopia-shaped blooms of spotted jewelweeds, however, draw ruby-throated hummingbirds that also sip their nectar.        A few raptor species, including American kestrels, bald eagles, ospreys, broad-winged hawks and red-tailed hawks begin their southbound migrations in August.  These birds, too, are going farther south to find ample prey animals for the winter.  They generally follow mountain ridges southwest during north and northwest winds, but scatter anywhere and everywhere on other winds.  The majestic ospreys and bald eagles also follow large waterways, such as the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers, and "hop" from one large, inland impoundment to another.  They catch fish along those bodies of water while they are migrating by them. 
     Obviously, these hawks and eagles get a head start on their migrations, but not in big numbers.  The migrations of these birds continue through much of autumn, except for the broadies that are past this area by late September.  
     Several kinds of insects, particularly annual cicadas, a few kinds of tree crickets and true katydids, are abundant and obvious in August; noticeable mostly by sound.  Several male cicadas in trees during warm days and evenings, especially in older suburban areas, simultaneously vibrate plates on their lower abdomens to produce choruses of pulsing, buzzy trills that entice females to them for mating before they all die. 
     At dusk each evening in August and September, male tree crickets begin chirping or trilling, according to their kind.  They produce that wonderful fiddling by rubbing their wings or wings and legs together, again according to their species.  The common and lovely snowy tree crickets are pale green, which camouflages them in bushes.  And they chirp rapidly in warm temperatures and slower in cooler ones.
     During August and September, the leaf-green, male true katydids rub their wings together to produce a chant that sounds like "Katy-did" and "Katy-didn't" in the treetops of woods and older suburbs.  Whether Katy did or not, those seemingly unending arguments, stridulations bring the genders together to mate before dying.  
     August beauties, as in all months of each year, remind me of a being far, far greater than ourselves.  I praise the Creator of the universe.