Some Summer Salt Marsh Wildlife

     Now that summer is here, many people will migrate by car, or truck, to the beaches of the North Atlantic Ocean, from New England to Florida, to recreate for a few days or more.  They will cross salt marshes up to a few miles wide from the mainland to barrier islands where the beaches, and housing and other accomodations are.  And on the way, in summer, they will see at least a few kinds of beautiful birds in those flat salt marshes that are composed mostly of salt marsh cord grass, and tidal channels and creeks, all of which are subjected to daily tides.
     The 6,000 acres of protected salt marshes since 1969 at the Wetlands Institute at Stone Harbor, New Jersey is an example of those tidal wetlands.  There one can stop in, and walk the trails into the surrounding salt marsh that harbors much interesting, wetland life in summer, including obvious bird life and other creatures.
     When driving through any salt marsh in summer, the stately great and snowy egrets and the omnipresent, handsome laughing gulls are the birds most readily seen there.  The egrets are large and white, and easily spotted as they snare small fish, such as killifish, sheepshead minnows and mummichogs in distant channels.  The trim gulls often fly right along the roads where their gray tops, white underparts and black heads are readily visible to even casual observers of the marshes.
     The egrets only fish in coastal salt marshes, but hatch young in stick nests in trees, mostly in The South.  The egrets we see in salt marshes in mid-summer are post-breeders.  But colonies of laughing gulls raise offspring in grass nurseries nestled in taller grass in salt marshes.  About the biggest nesting colony of laughing gulls in North America is in the wetlands around the Wetlands Institute.  Parent laughing gulls, with their black heads, search the salt marshes, coastal beaches and boardwalks for food for their young, one of the reasons they are abundant icons of  those seaside habitats in summer.  There they almost constantly emit their boisterous, laughing-like cries and scavenge food thrown to them by vacationing folks, much to those peoples' entertainment.
     Many sections of salt marshes each hosts a pair of ospreys, most of which, these days, builds a stick nursery on a platform erected especially for ospreys in the salt marshes.  Ospreys plunge from the air into the creeks and channels of salt marshes to catch larger fish to feed themselves and their two or three youngsters in their nest.  It's exciting to see one of these large fish hawks diving feet-first into the water and pulling a fish from it.
     Strikingly handsome male red-winged blackbirds, that are black with a red patch on each shoulder, sway on top of tall grasses as they sing their "kon-ga-reee" songs several times in succession to establish nesting territory and attract a mate for breeding and raising young.  Red-wings among tall grasses along the roads are the most easily seen, of course, as are their brown and black-streaked mates building grassy cradles among the grass stems above the ground or water.
     The Wetlands Institute has erected an apartment purple martin nesting house just outside its visitors' center.  The pretty parent martins are entertaining to watch flying over the marsh all day every day to  catch mosquitoes, green-headed flies and other flying insects to feed to their young.
     Clapper rails live in salt marshes the year around, and raise young in them.  These well camouflaged birds that are built like small chickens with long beaks hunt a variety of invertebrates among the tall grasses, and on the mud flats of channels when the water goes out with the tide.  In fact, they are most readily seen when the tide is out, creating large mud flats where they search for worms, insects, snails, clams and other types of invertebrates.  Sometimes one can hear them call "cha-cha-cha-cha" or bup-bup-bup-bup" from the depths of grass in the vast marsh      
     Willets are a large species of sandpipers that are not visible to most people until those marsh birds take wing.  Then we can easily see the broad, white bars on each wing waving like banners as the those sandpipers fly across the marsh.
     Willets nest in the salt marshes and each female lays four eggs in a grass cradle on the ground among the tall grasses.           
     One of the major goals of the Wetland Institute is to save as many diamond-backed terrapins as they can in the marshes around their facility.  Staff there put little, wire  baskets over terrapin nests in the sand to stop raccoons and skunks digging up the eggs and eating them.  Staff also pick up dead terrapins on the roads to look for still-viable eggs in the females.  They collect and incubate those eggs and feed the young turtles in large containers until those terrapins are large enough to not be eaten by larger gulls.
     During the full moon or new moon in May thousands of large, adult horseshoe crabs, which are related to scorpions and spiders, spawn on beaches along the Atlantic Coast, including up salt creeks into the Wetlands Institute marshes.  Meanwhile, many thousands of migrating shorebirds, including red knots, sanderlings, dunlin, semi-palmated sandpipers and ruddy turnstones, stop along Atlantic beaches to feed and develop fat on dull-greenish horseshoe crab eggs in the sand before continuing their flight north to the Arctic tundra to nest.  The arachnid swarms and shorebird flocks together make an annual, exciting spectacle second to none.
     Many fiddler crabs are seen on the mud flats of salt marsh channels when the tide goes out.  Male fiddlers have one over-sized front claw they wave "hello" to get the attention of female fiddlers for mating.  Fiddlers pick up sand and mud with their smaller claws and put them in their mouths to suck out and swallow any nutrients, and spit out the leached sand and mud.  Some fiddlers are eaten hy willets, rails, gulls and other creatures.  Fiddlers run sideways down their burrows when the water comes back and close a trapdoor behind them.  
     Other birds will be spotted in summer when walking on trails in the salt marshes of the Wetland Institute and other salt marshes.  Common terns, least terns and black skimmers, all of which nest on beaches and similar places along the Atlantic Coast, can be seen along tidal creeks and channels in salt marshes where they catch small fish.  Terns dive in headfirst after finny prey, but skimmers skim along the surface while in flight and dipping their lower mandible in the water.  When the lower mandible feels a small fish, the skimmer snaps its bill shut on that victim.
     Flocks of dark, long-legged glossy ibis feed on insects and other kinds of invertebrates in salt marshes at times.  But they, like egrets, nest in trees and shuttle food to their young in their nests.
     And seaside sparrows, salt marsh sparrows and marsh wrens nest among the tall grasses of salt marshes, and eat insects and invertebrates there.  They are not so easy to see, but they can be heard, if one listens closely.  The sparrows have buzzy songs that don't carry well, but the wren has a ringing, staccato song that is easy to hear.
     Salt marshes harbor many interesting critters in summer.  They are well worth visiting, if one can tolerate the attentions of green-headed flies. 
    
     

Plain Southwestern Doves

     By cruising the internet, I found, live by camera, a bird feeder in the woods of Sabal Palm Sanctuary in the Rio Grande Valley at Brownsville, in the southern most tip of Texas.  That feeder attracts green jays, black-crested titmice, chachalacas, curve-billed thrashers, northern cardinals, three kinds of plain-looking doves- mourning, white-winged and white-tipped, and other bird species.  Sometimes all three types of doves are on that feeder at once, showing their similarities, and differences.  The brown feathering, with minimal markings, of the doves camouflages them well among vegetation and on the ground.
     These three species of doves have much in common besides being plain in feathering, showing their close relationship from a common ancestor.  They have all adapted to human-made habitats to their great benefit, and our pleasure in seeing them close-up and regularly.  They are all about ten inches long at maturity.  All dine mostly on seeds and waste grain of various kinds.  All come to feeders the year around, when given the opportunity.  They all also ingest small pebbles that help grind the seeds and grain in their powerful stomachs.  They all drink by dipping their beaks into water and pumping it up into their throats like mammals sucking up water. 
     Male doves coo, each kind having its own rythm of cooing to maintain territory and entice his life-long partner into mating.  Each female lays two white eggs in a clutch and attempts several broods of young during the warm months of each year.  Both genders of each pair of each species feeds throat phlegm and pre-digested seeds to their young in their flimsy nurseries of twigs and straw in trees, bushes and other sheltering plants.  And these doves are all highly prized by hunters, mostly because of their swift, challenging flight. 
     Mourning doves live and nest across the United States, from coast to coast, in very southern Canada and down into Mexico.  They nest in abundance in suburban areas and feed in grain fields after the harvests, including here in southeastern Pennsylvania.  This species has the most dark marking on its brown plumage, distinguishing it from its close relatives.  Starting in early spring, males call " oo-aa-ooo-ooo-ooo" with the "aa" being higher in pitch that the other notes.  Cooing rythms also identify each species.
     White-winged doves are distinguished by the white feathers on the lower margin of each wing when the birds are perched.  A large patch of white on each wing is noticed when these birds are in flight. 
     White wings nest in colonies of themselves inside dense, thorny, streamside woods, on cacti in cactus deserts and in suburban areas in the southwest United States, south to Panama and Cuba.  Males call a low "hhoooo-hhoooo-hoo-hhoooo".
     White-tipped doves are named for the white tip to their tails.  This plain dove lives and nests in scrub woods from very southern Texas south through Mexico and Central America, south to Argentina.  The Rio Grande Valley in the southern tip of Texas is as far north as they get.  Attractive chestnut linings on this dove's underwings, visible when they are in flight, are an interesting part of this bird's plumage.  Males utter a call of two low-pitched "hoos".
     It's interesting that three kinds of closely-related, plain-brown dove species live in the same habitat at Brownsville, Texas.  And one can see them by getting on line, or visiting Sabal Palm Sanctuary.            
 

Mallards and Canadas

     Though familiar, everyday birds around human-made impoundments, lawns and fields in suburban areas and farmland in southeastern Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, mallard ducks and Canada geese are as handsome species of waterfowl as any other kinds of ducks and geese.  I have seen groups, pairs and families of both species most everywhere in every one of those habitats.  Newly-hatched ducklings and goslings in early May are cute, but grow quickly and are nearly full-sized by August.  And the main reason for the abundance of mallards and Canadas in human-made environments is their being adaptable enough to regularly use built habitats to live, feed and raise young in.
     Drake and hen mallards are both attractive in different ways.  Drakes have gray body feathering, maroon chests and iridescent-green heads.  Females are brown with darker markings that camouflage them, which is important when setting on eggs and raising equally-camouflaged ducklings.
     Female mallards hatch young in tall grass and other sheltered places, usually near ponds and creeks in cropland.  They raise the ducklings alone, getting no help from their green-headed mates, who form bachelor groups by late April.
     But some hens raise youngsters in suburban areas.  Each female mallard lays about 12 eggs under sheltering shrubbery on the edges of lawns, even a bit of a distance from water.  But she leads her brood to a nearby pond or small waterway where the young grow up quickly by eating invertebrates mostly, to ingest protein.  Over the years, a couple of female mallards hatched ducklings under bushes in our yard and led their progeny to a nearby, suburban pond to feed and grow.
     But of most interest is many hen mallards in the last several years, including the present one, hatch ducklings in the closed-in courtyards of some schools, churches and businesses.  Each hen flies over the building and into the courtyard to lay her clutch, one egg per day.  Those eggs and resulting ducklings are safe in the courtyard from the maraudings of skunks, raccoons and other predators, but the baby ducks usually don't have any water, or enough space to get enough food to survive to maturity.  And unable to fly out, they are trapped in those courtyards.
     However, kindly people herd the female mallard and her brood through a courtyard door into the building, down a hallway to a door to the outside world.  Out the mother and babies go, into the outside world where there is ample food and water, but also predators that could take some of the ducklings.
     Adult mallards collect in flocks through each winter, resting on ponds, or slow-flowing creeks when pond water freezes, and feeding on corn kernels in harvested corn fields.  They even use their scoop-like beaks to push under a shallow snow cover to shovel up corn.
     Mallards are their most interesting in winter at dusk on sunny days, when snow is on the ground.  Bunches of them sweep swiftly off ponds and waterways, with a whistling of wings, and power quickly across the sky, silhouetted black before brilliant sunsets.  They circle a harvested cornfield they intend to land on and watch for potential danger around it.  If their are no threats, they descend as a group, or groups, to the field, sometimes disappearing and reappearing in blowing snow tinged pink by the setting sun.  The ducks, wind, snow and sun together create a wild, beautiful sight on those snow-covered, frigid fields.
     During the 1950's, the only Canada geese I saw were those winging high in the sky in V shapes in October.  They were geese migrating south from nesting grounds in eastern Canada to winter in the Chesapeake Bay Area.  But Canada geese were stocked in southeastern Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, in the 1960's.  Now there are nesting Canada geese in much of the Lower 48.
     Famous for their V shapes in flight, loud, inspiring honking and living around human-made impoundments and short-grass lawns, stately Canada geese are majestic in public parks and other human-made habitats where they are easily seen by people. 
     Like mallards, Canada geese are adaptable, permanent residents in southeastern Pennsylvania.      
In winter, they roost in large flocks on impoundments, and feed on corn kernels in harvested cornfields, and green blades of winter rye and lawn grass.
     Pairs of Canadas hatch about five goslings each by late April around farm or park ponds, and the whole family grazes on lawn grass.  Both similar-appearing members of each pair escort and protect their goslings from predators and the elements. 
     Some pairs of Canadas nest above ground, which is a departure from the normal for them.  I've seen nests of Canada geese in abandoned hawk or heron nests and on the old bridge supports of train tracks over the Susquehanna River.  This keeps eggs and goslings away from ground predators, but the goslings must jump to the ground to get food and water. 
     The pretty mallards and magnificent Canadas are abundant and ever-present in southeastern Pennsylvania because they adapted to human-made habitats.  They lend a bit of the wild to public parks, farmland and suburban areas the year around.

Natural Evening Spectacles

     Intriguing natural activities happen during evenings in southeastern Pennsylvania, many of which I experienced.  All these unforgettable events are entertaining, interesting, and inspiring to me in these times of bad news.  They help make life more enjoyable.
     Occasionally at dusk during January and February, when a couple of inches of snow are on the ground, I cruise country roads to watch for groups of stately white-tailed deer emerging slowly
from shadowy, gray woodlands and entering alfalfa and winter rye fields to graze on those crops.  Snow, and moonlight, makes the gathering deer stand out majestically, as dusk silently fades to the darkness of night.
     Starting about mid-afternoon every day from November to March, for the last several years, noisy rivers of American crows that nested in Canada, pour across the sky from every direction to converge on trees at Park City Shopping Mall, just outside Lancaster City.  Those great floods of crows are especially striking when silhouetted in front of brilliant winter sunsets.  And as those sunsets fade to twilight, the last of the crows are winging toward Park City to join their still-cawing hordes of relatives on overnight roosts.
     Many evenings from mid-February to the middle of March, hordes of migrant snow geese leave harvested corn fields and winter rye fields, where they fed on corn kernels on the ground, sometimes under a thin cover of snow, and the green blades of rye, and fly back to the 400-acre impoundment at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area where they will rest, preen their feathers and socialize.  People at Middle Creek's lake see masses of snow geese flying silhouetted against the darkening sky, flock after boisterous flock, like wavelets sliding up a beach.  And, with each bird setting its wings like parachutes, the great, clamoring flocks swing down into the wind, one after another, as if on an aerial waterfall to the water.  What a wild, inspiring sight snow geese are.  But by mid-March they are off through Canada, little by little, until they reach their nesting territories on the Arctic tundra. 
     But 600,000 migrant sandhill cranes, settling each evening from mid-March to the middle of April on the broad, shallow channels of the Platte River in southcentral Nebraska, outdo flocks of snow geese in sheer numbers and awesome pageantry.  Late each afternoon, sandhill flocks leave harvested corn fields and start returning to the Platte to spend the night standing on gravel bars and braids of shallow water.  By sunset, they return to the Platte in ever-increasing, silhouetted numbers and begin to fill the sky with their noisy, river-circling flocks.  One can see flock after flock of them in the distance coming to the Platte from all directions.  Meanwhile, silhouetted masses of them are closer to the river, and still other groups are circling the river or landing on it, all the while calling hoarsely.  Flocks of cranes continue to return to the river until darkness envelopes them from our view.
     Sandhill cranes winter in southern Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.  In March they start migrating north to Canada and Alaska, but stop at the Platte River to spend days eating waste corn kernels in harvested Nebraska corn fields before continuing north to raise young.
     Every evening late in March and through much of April, groups of male spring peeper frogs peep shrilly and gatherings of male American toads trill musically in wetlands and the shallows of pools and ponds in southeastern Pennsylvania, and throughout much of the eastern United States.  The primeval calls of these amphibians are audible for some distance and are a joy and inspiration to hear on sunny, spring evenings.  And that wild, ancient calling, of course, brings the genders of each species together to spawn.
     Bats of various kinds create natural spectacles at dusk during summer evenings, including here in southeastern Pennsylvania.  They perform all kinds of entertaining sweeps, loops and dives to catch flying insects, much to many peoples' enjoyment.
     Millions of winged mayflies fly up in tremendous swarms from the Susquehanna River to breed and spawn eggs in one day and night back into the river.  They spent a year on the rocky bottom of the river as larvae feeding on aquatic invertebrates.  But in one 24 hour period they filled the air, trees, buildings, outdoor lights, and everything else with themselves and spawned, or fed many birds and bats, or made roads slippery with their crushed bodies. 
     Right after sunset and into the dark of each evening in late June and through much of July in southeastern Pennsylvania, and across the eastern United States, millions of male fireflies crawl up grass stems and launch themselves into slow, hovering flight.  All that while each firefly flashes his cold, abdominal light as he goes to attract the attention of female fireflies still among grass stems.
Those wonderful, blinking beetle lights bring the genders together for mating.  But to us human observers, those twinkling, evening lights are enchanting, and enjoyable to experience on warm, summer nights.
     Right after every sunset late in July and during August and September, millions of male true katydids rub their wings together in the treetops to make a rasping sound that sounds like "Katy-did".  Those scratchy stridulations bring the genders together for mating in the treetops.  Katydids consumed tree leaves all summer before spawning, but October frosts kill them.  Then their species survives only in the egg stage through winter.   
     Post-breeding chimney swifts roost together at night in large chimneys, with scores or hundreds of them in each chimney.  Swifts catch flying insects all day, but at dusk they congregate about their roosting chimneys to spend each night in them until they migrate in early September to northern South America to avoid the northern winter.
     Each August evening, hundreds of swifts circle again and again around their roosting chimney.  But as darkness deepens, many swifts dive into the chimney with each pass of their feathered wheel over that human-made chasm.  Soon all the birds are clinging upright with their tiny, sharp claws to the inner walls of their chimneys and all is quiet on the outside.
     During September nights of a full moon, or nearly so, one can train a scope on the moon as it "moves" slowly across the sky.  With patience, one can see small, migrating birds passing silhouetted before the moon at irregular intervals as they migrate to Central and South America to seek reliable food sources during the northern winter.  Seeing some of those birds is always a thrill!
     These natural, evening spectacles are entertaining, enjoyable and inspiring.  They are a joy to experience.
    
    
    

Wasp Nursery Constructors

     Two interesting and attractive kinds of wasps, including paper wasps and organ pipe mud dauber wasps, build nurseries for their young here in southeastern Pennsylvania, as well as in much of eastern North America.  These wasps have characteristics in common, including having thin "waists" where their thoraxes meet their abdomens and building nurseries that are common and fairly obvious in sheltering, human-made constructions.  Adults of each kind can sting, but are not usually aggressive.  Adults of each species sip flower nectar in open, sunny habitats, while their larvae are carnivorous.  But the wingless youngsters consume different prey, thus eliminating competition for food between them.   
     Paper wasps are three-quarters of an inch long and reddish-brown, with yellow rings of color on their thoraxes and abdomens.  In spring, cooperative groups of several fertile females work together to make nests of chewed wood pulp and their own saliva.  Each of these paper-like nurseries of several cells per nest is open underneath where adult wasps feed the young, but covered on top and hangs by a thin strand of paper from the ceiling of an over-hanging boulder, or a porch roof, a pavilion, a bridge or some other human-made construction.  These hanging nests protect the larvae from rain and wind.  
     One female paper wasp of each group becomes queen and lays an egg in each paper cell.  The first couple of generations of larvae, per summer, are all females, cared for by unmated female workers of each colony.  Adults feed young wasps insects they caught and pre-chewed.  Young wasps get lots of protein that they will grow on.  Adult wasps and their progeny do not compete for the same food. 
     Fertilized eggs become females and unfertilized eggs become fertile males. At the end of each summer, only mated young queens overwinter in the ground under leaf litter, or in stone walls.  They start new colonies of paper wasps the next spring and summer.  Old queens, female workers and males die in the frosts of autumn.
     Organ pipe mud dauber wasps are about an inch long and iridescent-black.  Each solitary female wasp of this species builds a few long tubes of mud on a smooth, vertical surface under a boulder or roof that will protect her offspring from rain. 
     Each mud dauber female rolls mud into balls and carries each one separately in her mouth to her chosen location to build her nursery.  Mud ball after mud ball is added to each tube and those tubes are plastered vertically together, making them look like joined pipes on a tiny organ, hence this wasp's common name.      
     Each dried tube has a few cells in it, and each cell will harbor a wasp larvae.  After making those mud tubes, each mother pipe organ wasp places a spider she paralyzed into each cell and lays an egg on it.  Then she closes the cell with mud.  The hatched youngster feeds on the spider, pupates in the mud cell and later emerges as a mature wasp ready to carry on the species another generation. 
     Paper wasps and organ pipe mud dauber wasps have intriguing life histories, as all life does.  And when readers find their nests under sheltering, human-made objects, admire their works, and the wasps themselves; but there is no reason to be afraid of them.  Just leave them alone.