A Typical March Day in the Woods

     Today, March 16, 2019, I drove through a small bottomland woods, bisected by a stream lined on both sides by crack willow trees, in an area about 30 minutes from home in New Holland, Pennsylvania.  A cold wind roared through and swayed the trees in that hundred-acre, deciduous woodland, but the sky was blue with several puffy, white cumulus clouds. 
     I stopped by a stream in that bottomland woods and heard several male wood frogs croaking hoarsely in shallow puddles of snow melt and recent rain near that waterway.  The rain the night before and the warmer weather of yesterday and a few days before that awoke those frogs that immediately hopped over the rain-soaked leaf cover to those puddles to croak and draw females of their kind there to spawn during the next few days.  The pools, dotted with several skunk cabbage hoods and small, but developing, leaves, were soaked in warming sunlight, which helped the cold-blooded frogs have the vigor to croak, and spawn thousands of eggs in gelatin masses of scores of eggs in each one. 
     I thought perhaps some spotted salamanders were also spawning in those pools.  Wood frogs and spotted salamanders share woodland floor habitats and spawning pools.  But I didn't want to disturb the frogs there, so I didn't look for salamanders.     
     As I listened to the wood frogs, I was excited to see a male mink furtively darting here and there along the stream and disappearing among tangles of weeds and fallen limbs.  He probably was looking for a mate or two.  Although mink seem plentiful here in southeastern Pennsylvania, they are not a species ones sees everyday.
     A short time later, a pair of beautiful wood ducks landed on a slow-moving stretch of the stream and swam to sheltering limbs hanging over and in the streamside.  They probably were searching among the big white oak and American beech trees up the shallow slope from the waterway for a suitable nesting cavity the hen woody will use to lay her clutch of 12 or more eggs.
     When the ducklings hatch about mid-May, they will crawl up the inside of that tree hollow and jump out the entrance, one at a time.  Each duckling will bounce on the dead-leaf covered ground.  And when all are gathered, their mother will take them to the stream and the shallow edges of the impoundment that waterway flows into.  There the ducklings will feast on a variety of invertebrates and grow fast, becoming full grown by the end of summer. 
     I hoped I would see a pair of hooded mergansers along that same waterway because I know wood ducks and hooded mergansers share nesting habitats and both species hatch young in tree cavities near water.  Adults of each species has a different food supply, however, making the two species more compatible in the same habitats.  Adult woodies feed mostly on greens, seeds and nuts while mature hoodies consume small fish they catch with their narrow, serrated beaks.  
     As I continued to watch for other kinds of wildlife in this narrow, wooded bottomland, I thought this would be a place to watch for courting American woodcocks at sunset during March and April evenings.  Woodcocks are a type of inland sandpiper that inhabits woodland floors in the eastern United States.  Each male at dusk performs a courtship display to attract females of his kind to him for mating.
     At dusk, evening after evening in spring, each male flies from his daytime roost on a bottomland woods floor to a little patch of bare ground in a nearby clearing.  There he vocally "beeps" for about a minute, then spirals up in flight with his wings twittering.  Somewhere in the sky he levels off and vocally utters several musical notes.  Then he plummets to his bare spot on the ground to start his display again and again.  Only hunger or interested females interrupt his displays. 
     At night, woodcocks poke their long beaks into soft, moist soil of bottomland woods to pull out and ingest earthworms and other invertebrates.  But they rest well camouflaged on carpets of dead leaves during the day.
     My little adventure on a typical March day in that wooded bottomland was quite enjoyable and inspiring.  But then, most any day outdoors is enjoyable and inspiring.