Farmland WildLife in August

     Certain kinds of plants and animals are adapted to living in farmland in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, making that human-made habitat more interesting.  Those living beings are more examples of nature's adjustments to human activities.
     Driving through Lancaster County cropland early this August, I passed a field of mostly bare ground with rows of soybean plants newly emerging from the soil.  I saw a half dozen killdeer plovers glide gracefully over the field on swept-back wings and abruptly land on the soybean field, immediately disappearing because of their camouflaging plumage on the bare ground.  I stopped and counted about 50 killdeer on that field.  Killdeer are inland shorebirds that generally live in open habitats such as gravel bars and mud flats that have little or no vegetation along lake shores.  They naturally adapted to human-made, bare ground fields where few other inland bird species dwell. There killdeer consume many invertebrates they find on the soil.
     While admiring and counting the killdeer, I saw several horned larks walking about among the soybean plants.  Horned larks, being brown on top, are also adapted to and camouflaged on bare ground and sparsely vegetated land because they evolved on prairies and tundra with short or no vegetation.  Horned larks consume invertebrates during warmer months and weed and grass seeds in cold months.      
     Killdeer and horned larks hatch young in bare-ground fields.  Killdeer babies are fluffy when they hatch and ready to walk about and feed themselves about 24 hours after hatching.  Lark chicks, however, are helpless when they hatch and must be fed by their parents until they fledge their tea-cup-sized nursery in the bare soil.    
     A pair of beautiful, wild rock pigeons were in that field eating weed and grass seeds still on the surface and bits of stone that grinds those seeds in their stomachs.  Pigeons prefer habitats with short or no plants, where they can walk well on short legs.  This familiar species evolved along the Mediterranean Sea where they still nest on cliffs and find seeds on beaches, mud flats and rocky ground below those cliffs.  These mostly-gray birds, too, are well-adapted to bare-ground fields in farmland.
     As I studied the killdeer, larks and pigeons on the nearly-bare ground, several each of barn swallows and purple martins, another kind of swallow, swirled low and swiftly over the killdeer field and neighboring fields after flying insects they catch in their broad mouths and swallow.  Those two swallow species were mostly done raising young for this year and fattening up on insects prior to their flight south to escape the northern winter.    
     The adaptable barn swallows traditionally rear offspring on cliffs and in the mouths of caves, but now also on support beams in barns and under bridges.  Small colonies of purple martins traditionally hatched young in big, dead, but still-standing trees riddled with cavities.  And now they also have babies in apartment bird houses erected by farmers.  Both species, however, need wide open spaces in which to swoop and glide after flying insects, which they get in cropland.
     All these bird species, and more, are pre-adapted to open habitats, both natural and human-made.  They increase their numbers by raising young in built habitats, as well as in natural ones.  And we get to enjoy the beauties and intrigues of those birds, and other wildlife, on land we use for ourselves.