natureswondersbyclyde

      This February, 2025, I watched flocks of Canada geese, tundra swans and snow geese on an 800-acre lake at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area, owned by the Pennsylvania Game Commission in southeastern Pennsylvania, by the commission's live camera and our home computer screen, as I do every spring.  And on February 10 to the 12th I enjoyed polarized weather at Middle Creek, as well.        On February tenth, a pretty, sunny late-afternoon added to the beauty of the geese and swans on that lake and in the air over it.  Beige grass fields and gray woods surrounded that lovely lake and its stately birds.  And later that evening, I saw the waterfowl at rest on the lake's water and ice, under several stars and the nearly full moon; an inspiring sight.      But February 11 and 12 had different weather, with cloudy skies, snow flurries and a bit of fog by late afternoon, making the landscape dreary to many people....

      The adaptations of life on Earth is, seemingly, unending.  Probably every niche on this planet is used by at least one kind of plant, fungus or animal.  That came to my mind again while watching a nature documentary on you tube T V about life in the open ocean, narrated by David Attenborough.  As part of his narration, Attenborough noted that Columbus crabs are a half-inch, pelagic species that shelter among clumps of floating plants and trees that fell into the oceans, and under floating human-made debris, including lumber, discarded fish nets, collections of plastic objects and other objects.          This extraordinary, little crab's name is also unusual.  It is thought that these tiny crabs were first discovered by Christopher Columbus on one of his voyages west on the Atlantic Ocean.  He might have noticed them on plants in the Sargasso Sea.       As an interesting pelagic species, Colum...

     Some years ago, when I lived in Neffsville, Pennsylvania, I trimmed shrubbery on my lawn and piled the limbs in a shallow ditch to let them decompose.  One afternoon in August, a thunderstorm dumped a deluge of rain on Neffsville.  The ditch soon filled with water that ran through my brush pile in the ditch.  I watched to see if any critters would emerge from the heap to escape the water.  Sure enough, within a minute, an opossum, North America's only marsupial, emerged from that brush pile and climbed a nearby tree.  And about a minute later, a striped skunk crawled out of that pile of boughs and waddled across our lawn to higher ground.  I was happy to see both those mammals in our yard.       I've seen many skunks and possums in southeastern Pennsylvania over the years, most of them on lawns and along country roads, and mostly at night.  These mammals have some traits in common.  Both are adaptable, eat a...

      At least a few pairs of mourning doves nest in our suburban neighborhood in New Holland, Pennsylvania.  I see them here from early February, when their nesting season begins until mid to late September, when it ends.  These beautiful, interesting birds are well-adapted to living among peoples' activities in suburbs and farmland, human-made habitats that have increased dove numbers dramatically.      Mourning doves, like many life forms, notice the increased amount of daylight each succeeding day in January, which stirs their hormones.  The doves respond with repetitive cooing during warm afternoons in early February, which, along with northern cardinals, are the first bird songs I hear in our suburban neighborhood.  That cooing, and the male doves' courtship flights of several deep wing beats alternating with long, circular glides over their hoped-for nesting territories, strengthens each pair's bond.       Duri...

      When snow flies in the northeastern United States, seed-eating birds fly, too- straight to a source of readily available food, including at bird feeders.  Through a live camera and our computer screen, I regularly watch birds at a group of five feeders in a successional woods in southern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  Those woods also have thickets, little, weedy open areas, and a stream flowing through.  The gray woodland and thickets offer shelter to the birds, gray squirrels, and flying squirrels at night.      Well-stocked by Lancaster County Conservancy staff, those feeders are constantly visited by birds wintering in nearby woods and thickets.  Those birds are artificially concentrated because of the lure of the easily-obtained grain, but they are beautiful, and interesting to watch at the feeders, especially during snowy days.      As snow falls, the many birds at the feeders seem exceptionally frantic to fe...

      Barnacle geese are interesting for where they hatch goslings- high on rocky cliffs in northeast Greenland, Spitzbergen Island and northwest Siberia.  They do that to keep their eggs and newly-hatched goslings away from Arctic foxes, Arctic wolves and polar bears.  But the geese and their goslings have no food on those cliffs.  Therefore, the goslings must leap off those cliffs and drop to the grassy tundra below.      On the tundra, at the bases of the cliffs, each pair of barnacle geese call to their three or four goslings to take the plunge, which they do.  One after another, the goslings leap off their nurseries and bounce and tumble off boulders down the faces of the cliffs to their rocky bottoms.  There the surviving goslings join their parents to march to nearby patches of grass close to water to feed on that grass.        Most of those fuzzy-gray, camouflaged youngsters survive their fall, but s...