I attended many picnics and other summer gatherings in park pavilions in southeastern Pennsylvania over the years. And in that time I've seen many species of wildlife in those pavilions. Which is odd because many pavilion floors are made of cement. The pavilions are built in manicured habitats of short grass and tall trees and are often filled with people and their activities. Most of the wildlife seen in southeastern Pennsylvania pavilions are adaptable birds, mammals and insects of various kinds; a kind of creature clean-up crew.
Bold and boisterous house sparrows, starlings and common grackles regularly take advantage of many human-made sources of food. And that includes entering pavilions to eat crumbs left lying on tables, benches and floors after the people leave.
And, surprising to me at first, gray catbirds and chipping sparrows, which are retiring kinds of birds, also flutter into pavilions to help with the clean-up of edibles. The cute, little sparrows with rufous crowns are often difficult to identify as they hop about quietly on the cement floors, picking up tidbits with their bills.
Gray squirrels and eastern chipmunks often visit pavilions to get food, sometimes even when people are still in them. Some people feed those rodents from their fingertips, which is not a good practice because of the possibility of rabies and other diseases.
Sometimes a skunk, opossum or raccoon will shuffle into a pavilion at night, even when outdoor, safety lights are on, to look for edibles. Raccoons will even raid trash barrels for tidbits. Again, it's better to leave those fur-bearers alone at all times.
Pairs of American robins and/or eastern phoebes build nurseries on top of support beams and some light structures. Those birds start their cradles in spring before the pavilions are heavily used, often raising young to flight before people throng the pavilions. And some pairs of each species raise a second brood, the parents sticking it out to continue shuttling food to their young in their nests.
What's a picnic without pesky flies and ants? Both these families of familiar insects are sure to be present at every summer picnic to ingest whatever tidbits they can. But they are interesting, living beings seen in pavilions.
Two kinds of wasps and one type of bee create nurseries for their young in pavilions. Female carpenter bees chew holes in the undersides of support beams to hatch young. When their cavities are ready, each female bee puts a ball of nectar and pollen in the back of each hollow, lays an egg on it and partitions it off. She continues this process until each hole in the beam is filled. Each larva hatches, eats its store of nectar and pollen, pupates and emerges as an adult bee.
About a dozen female paper wasps, one of which becomes a queen, gather together under a pavilion roof to build a small nest of several cells made of "paper". These wasps chew dead wood, mixed with their saliva, to make a pliable pulp to create the adjoining, six-sided cells and attach them to the roof by a sturdy paper stem. The queen lays an egg in each cell and all the female workers feed paralyzed insects to the young until they pupate and emerge as adult wasps.
Female mud-dauber wasps carry loads of mud in their mouths to make long, thin and hollow tubes they plaster on the vertical support beams and walls of pavilions. They lay eggs in those mud tubes and feed the larvae paralyzed insects.
Spiders of a few kinds spin webs in the corners of pavilions. Those webs, of course, catch flying insects. When the spiders feel the insects struggling in their webs, they run across their webs and wrap the victims in silk. Later, each spider sucks the juices from each of its paralyzed prey.
There are whole communities of critters in pavilions in summer. All those creatures are there to get food and/or shelter from predators and the weather. The next time the reader is in a pavilion, look for these species of wildlife, and you might see some not mentioned here.
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