For a couple of hours in the afternoon of August 14, 2019, I visited one of my favorite nature spots, close to home, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania's farmland. The "spot" is an overgrown, quarter-mile long, 20 yards wide strip of young ash-leafed maples, silver maples and black walnuts, red-twigged and gray-twigged dogwood shrubbery, tall grass and flowering plants. That beautiful, overgrown thicket of vegetation is bisected by a clear, running stream and closely paralleled by a country road.
My nature snooping that day became one of summer and fall wild flowers, butterflies and aquatic creatures, all of which are typical here at this time of year.
Some of the stream-side flowers in bloom that day included lots of orange, cornocopia-shaped blooms on spotted jewelweeds, some great lobelias with dark blue blossoms, pink-flowered swamp milkweeds, the bluish-purple blossoms of blue vervains, the streamside hugging arrowhead plants with white flowers and wild mints with tiny, pale-purple blossoms. One swamp milkweed plant was especially interesting because up to four monarch butterflies visited it at once to at least sip nectar. Perhaps a female or two was also laying eggs, one at a time, on the milkweed's leaves. The branching stems of the blue vervains resembled candlabras. And several lovely, dark and rusty-red digger wasps were busily sipping nectar from the mint blossoms, pollinating them as well.
There were other kinds of butterflies visiting those stream-side flowers that day, including spicebush swallowtails, big, yellow and black tiger swallowtails, fritillaries, silver-spotted skippers, least skippers, cabbage whites and yellow suphurs. Those butterflies, constantly fluttering from bloom to bloom, added lots of beauty and entertainment to the flowering plants along Mill Creek.
I soon turned my attention to Mill Creek by sitting in an eight yard "window" composed of short grass in a dense, green wall of young trees and tall shrubbery. That window of short vegetation allowed a view of Mill Creek.
There the creek was shallow, clear and about fourteen feet across. Using 16 power binoculars, I saw a couple of small schools of banded killifish swimming upstream as they watched for tiny invertebrates to eat. I also saw three carp, each about a foot long, groveling upstream for plant and invertebrate food in the mud on the bottom of the waterway. Both kinds of fish blended into the bottom of the stream, which made them hard to see without binoculars, but, of course, that protects them from bald eagles, ospreys, herons and other kinds of predators.
While watching the fish with binoculars, I suddenly noticed two submerged mud turtles half-hidden under a leafy limb in a slower-moving part of the creek. They were walking on the bottom of the waterway, perhaps looking for invertebrate and plant food. I was surprised to see them because I didn't think they would be in that waterway. Unfortunately for me, they soon crawled out of sight under the limb.
Scanning the shoreline of Mill Creek, I spotted two young painted turtles perched on a small log to sun themselves and a big green frog sitting on a narrow, muddy shore under tall grass hanging protectively over that frog. The paints were beautiful with red and yellow stripes on their necks and front legs and the frog probably was watching for invertebrates it could catch and swallow.
I also saw two kinds of pretty and charming damselflies fluttering over Mill Creek, and landing on creek-side vegetation. They were black-winged damselflies, with the males having iridescent-green abdomens and four black wings they hold up at a 45 degree angle when at rest, and bluet damselflies, with males having blue abdomens and clear wings.
Each of these types of damselflies were youngsters under stones on the bottom of the creek where they caught and ate tiny invertebrates. But now as adults, they fly about looking for flying insects to eat and mates to reproduce with.
A few male black-winged damselflies "flutter-danced" in the sunlight over the creek, their green abdomens glistening in the sun, to attract females to them for mating. And one pair of black-wings were spawning eggs into plants in the slow-moving shallows along a shore.
There are other kinds of critters along this stretch of Mill Creek that I didn't see that day, including muskrats, snapping turtles, northern water snakes, mallard ducks, least sandpipers on exposed gravel bars, belted kingfishers, great blue herons, and an occasional great egret late in summer. Red-winged blackbirds, eastern kingbirds and willow flycatchers nest in the tall grass and shrubbery along the creek earlier in the summer. Even after abuse of this creek, and its surrounding cropland, several kinds of wildlife still live in and around it. Because these plants and animals are adaptable, they will survive indefinitely
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