AN OVERGROWN DITCH
Occasionally I visit an overgrown storm water drainage ditch near home in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to see what wild plants and creatures inhabit it. A row of young red juniper trees were planted between that ditch and a blacktop parking lot. Those junipers shelter birds such as northern mockingbirds, American robins and the like. And the junipers' pretty, pale-blue, berry-like cones are eaten by mockers, robins, starlings, cedar waxwings and other kinds of berry-eating birds in fall and winter. A mockingbird is usually among those junipers the year around. That ditch is about thirty yards long and ten yards wide. It is one of many hundreds of little, abandoned back areas in this area that become tiny wildlife habitats, and examples of nature healing itself after human activities destroyed the original habitats and then deserted them. Several kinds of plants pioneered this ditch and made into a bit of a wildlife refuge, as well as those plants holding down