Hints of Autumn

     On the afternoon of September 14 of this year, I took a drive through Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland to see what was happening in nature.  The sky was overcast with temperatures in the high 70's and a humid breeze, which is often typical weather here in early autumn.  There was a "feel of fall in the air".
     After a ten minute drive from home, I came to a meadow, a stream and a bottomland woodlot, all in one place that I occasionally visit.  There I saw the floodplain trees that grow along the waterway and in the pasture, several kinds of roadside, fall flowers, yellow sulphur butterflies and bees among the blossoms, and a few colored leaves.
     Floodplain trees in the woods include sycamores, shagbark hickories and river birches with their picturesque bark, white, swamp white and pin oaks with their acorns that feed white-tailed deer, gray squirrels and deer mice, black walnuts with their nuts that only squirrels can chew into, and silver, red and ash-leafed maples.  These trees adapted to tolerating the constantly moist soil of a bottomland, creating their own communities of trees in a riparian forest.  Sycamores have mottled bark, river birches have bark that peels into thin, curly strips that remain attached to trunks and limbs, and the hickories have long, vertical strips of solid bark, each one loosening at both ends from trunks and branches, giving the hickories a shaggy appearance.
     The autumn flowers I saw along the sunny edge of the woods and in the meadow were the orange ones of spotted jewelweeds, the yellow blossoms of pale jewelweeds, the golden flowers of goldenrod and tickseed sunflowers, the hot-pink blooms of ironweed, the pink of smartweed, the white of knotweed and the blue blossoms of great lobelias.  All these plants, but the lobelias are tall, and all of them, but goldenrods grow best in damp soil.
     Bumble bees visited the sunflower blooms to sip nectar.  Tiny skipper butterflies were on lobelia flowers while several yellow sulphur butterflies visited ironweed blossoms.  These insects added more interest to the flowers.
     Many of the black walnut trees and poison ivy vines had some yellow leaves on them, hinting again at autumn.  The poison ivy vines also had clusters of off-white berries that mice, squirrels and berry-eating birds consume in fall and winter, with no harmful affects.
     There also were some colorful berries on other kinds of plants on the edge of the woods.  Pokeweeds had deep-purple ones on pink stems, which causes a pretty color combination.  And multiflora rose bushes had numerous red berries among the green ones that didn't ripen yet.
     There were other kinds of invertebrates along the woods edge and in the meadow that indicated autumn.  I heard a mole cricket chirping from his underground burrow in the meadow, a call to females of his kind to join him in mating in his tunnel.  A big, beautiful female black and yellow garden spider perched in her large orb web hung from the wires of a fence.  She had grown all summer and was now ready to reproduce.  And there were several dragonflies of some kind hawking low over the tall grass of the pasture in search of flying insects to catch and ingest.  Those dragonflies might have been migrants, stopping long enough for a meal.
     I saw only a few birds in that spot in farmland, one per habitat.  A great blue heron flew up from the stream where it had been fishing.  A Carolina chickadee flitted among twigs in the woods, probably picking up tiny invertebrates to eat.  And an American kestrel, perhaps a migrant, perched on top of a dead tree in the pasture as that little hawk watched for mice and grasshoppers to ingest.
     After about an hour, I left that spot.  But I was filled with the beauty and intrigue of early fall.