Winter Thickets

     One morning in mid-December, I stopped along a rural road in southern Berks County, Pennsylvania because of an interesting mix of human-made habitats along that road.  An overgrown field hosted tall, lovely and dead foxtail grass, goldenrod and asters, all loaded with tiny seeds.  At one end of that field was a row of Tartarian honeysuckle bushes full of red berries.  Bittersweet and poison ivy vines climbed young trees on another edge of the field.  Those vines were full of berries, too.  Behind the field, there was a planted row of tall Norway spruce trees, most of which had large, beige cones hanging from their branch tips.  And a few pin oak trees, loaded with acorns, dotted a bottomland pasture.  All these attractive plants had foods that a variety of birds and mammals will eat through winter.  And I saw a few kinds of birds among those thickets of food sources and shelter while I was viewing those pretty human-made habitats beneficial to wildlife.  Little gatherings of American robins and eastern bluebirds were busily consuming strikingly-orange bittersweet berries, as they will all winter.  Blue jays were picking acorns from the pin oaks and flying away with those nuts in their beaks, one at a time, to poke them into tree crevices or push them into loose soil for safe keeping for winter food, as, no doubt, that had been doing since late October.  And a few each of house finches and northern cardinals were ingesting seeds from grasses, goldenrod and asters, as they will all winter.       
     I like overgrown, tangled thickets of young trees, bushes, vines, and tall weeds and grasses in hedgerows between fields, along the edges of woods, streams and rural roads, and in abandoned fields and meadows through the year, including in winter.  Each thicket has a variety of beautiful and intriguing plants and animals at all times.  Thickets, and marshes, are my favorite local habitats.
     I know there has to be many more kinds of vegetation and wildlife in that collection of neighboring human-made thickets I experienced that December morning in Berks County.  Cottontail rabbits and white-tailed deer will nibble grass, twigs and other vegetation.  Acorns from the pin oaks will feed gray squirrels, deer mice and wintering American crows.  Berries, including those on thorny-stemmed multiflora rose and barberry bushes, will feed yellow-rumped warblers, cedar waxwings and starlings through winter.  Red junipers have tiny, pale-blue cones that resemble berries and are eaten as such by the types of birds mentioned here.  The weed and grass seeds will nourish permanent resident song sparrows and American goldfinches and wintering white-throated sparrows and dark-eyed juncos all winter.
     Red foxes, opossums, striped skunks, raccoons and other kinds of mammals consume lots of crab apples from crab apple trees.  And a variety of birds ingest crab apples as well.  As with berries and red juniper cones, mammals and birds digest the pulp of crab apples, but pass the seeds in their droppings as they travel, thus spreading crab apple trees far and wide.   
     Small, winged seeds in Norway spruce cones are food to permanent resident American goldfinches and Carolina chickadees, and wintering pine siskins and two species of crossbills.  These birds climb about on the cones and pull the seeds out with their beaks, and eat seeds that fluttered to the ground.  Crossbills have crossed mandibles that aid in extracting seeds from coniferous tree cones.     
     Interesting, overgrown thickets like this one are all over southeastern Pennsylvania, and through much of the United States.  They all offer year around food and shelter to a large variety of wildlife.
And they have much beauty and intrigue for us to experience.  Thickets are well worth visiting, but without invading them.  Leave them alone for the benefit of wildlife.