natureswondersbyclyde

      Laughing gulls' black heads and incessant, laughing cries are abundant summer icons along Atlantic Ocean shorelines.  And, happily, those in-your-face gulls are everywhere along the Atlantic Coast- in salt marshes where they nest, on salt backwaters and channels off the ocean, sandy beaches, mud flats and boardwalks, and in towns on barrier islands along the ocean's shores.  But they seldom venture inland.  And they drift south in fall.        Thousands upon thousands of striking, loudly-calling laughing gulls arrive at their protective, tall-grass salt marshes, sprawled between barrier islands and the mainland along the Atlantic Coast by mid-April, and form breeding colonies of hundreds of pairs in each colony.  Amorous gulls pair off and court loudly with seemingly unending, laughing cries.  Each pair then makes a grassy nursery on slightly higher ground under tall grasses, where each female lays three olive or buf...

      I was walking along a hardly-used road in the wooded Welsh Mountains of eastern Lancaster County one afternoon in early June to enjoy nature.  I casually looked into a shallow trickle of clear water flowing by that road and saw a motion that looked like a small fish.  I thought no fish could live in that one-foot-across rivulet, but I looked at the spot where I saw the movement with an eight power pair of binoculars.  Immediately, I was treated to good looks of three male and one larger, chubbier female black-nosed dace cavorting in that trickle.  The slimmer, two-and-a-half-inch males had orange front fins and a deep-yellow stripe above and below a black bar on each side of each male.  The female only had a black stripe on each of her flanks.  I knew then that the cavorting in the clear shallows was the little fish spawning eggs.      I thought those dace got into that tiny trickle when it was bigger after pouring rain....

      Long Beach Island is a long, narrow barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay along the New Jersey seacoast.  That bay, like all backwaters off oceans, has salt water.  And Barnegat Bay stretches 42 miles, north and south,  between some of Jersey's protective, mostly-sandy barrier islands and its mainland.  Barrier islands protect backwaters, salt marshes and the mainland from the wind-driven ravages of the ocean.          Harvey Cedars is a town on Long Beach Island.  And that town stretches across the barrier island, from ocean to bay.       A small, remnant salt marsh lies between that town and Barnegat Bay.  A freshwater stream flows through the marsh and empties into Barnegat Bay.  That stream attracts several kinds of thirsty, salt marsh and bay birds the year around.  Small fish live in the stream and phragmites and clumps of tall grass grow along the st...

      As we sat on our deck in suburban New Holland, Pennsylvania at dusk on a May evening, I suddenly remembered, with pleasure, the gentle, beautiful songs of male wood thrushes and eastern wood pewees at twilight in June, in the forests of Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania.  I was a teenager the first time I heard them from an upstairs bedroom in a Mt. Gretna cottage.  The windows were open and the birds seemed to be singing from right outside them.  Each bird of both species repeatedly sang their heavenly songs until dusk became darkness in the woods.  And I have enjoyed those wonderful songs most every spring and summer since.       The lovely, clear notes of the wood thrushes sounded like fairy flutes- "eeee-o-llaaaa" or aaaa-o-lleeee".  Those pure notes from feathered, spot-breasted flutes floated lightly,  chorus after delightful chorus, through the darkening woods.          But the quiet, drea...

      One morning in spring, some years ago, I was walking through a soggy, bottomland woods near a creek in Lancaster County, Pa.  I noticed a pile of fine sawdust on the dead-leaf-covered ground under a dead limb of a tree,  Looking around, I noted a big black carpenter ant spitting sawdust out of a quarter-inch hole at my eye level in that dead bough.  Ant after ant took turns spitting sawdust out that hole as they chewed the dead wood in that branch to make tunnels and chambers for eggs, pupae and adults to live in there in relative safety.         I stopped to watch those busy ants for awhile.  And they were still working when I left their tree home.  Later, I became interested in the life history of carpenter ants in their dead wood niche in moist woods.      Sterile, female worker ants are a little less than a half inch long, and black.  They create tunnels and galleries inside dead trees, stumps...

      In the last several years, since the fur market is nearly non-existent because of the work of animals rights people, I've been thrilled to see many wild mink, male and female, along waterways in southeastern Pennsylvania.  Mink numbers apparently increased with much less trapping pressure.        Mink are a semi-aquatic member of the weasel family, having the long, thin bodies of weasels, and quick, untiring actions of weasels.  And mink have the same fierce predator attitude of all members of its family.              The first mink I saw was a female running along the Cocalico Creek near Ephrata in mid-March several years ago.  Naturally, I was excited to see her bounding along that waterway on some kind of a mission.       That same spring, I saw another female mink weaving quickly along a stream near Reinholds, and another female bounding across the New Holland Pik...