natureswondersbyclyde

      One mid-June afternoon, while doing errands in New Holland, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, I noticed a family group of eight American crows flying about from buildings to a row of staghorn sumac trees, and back again, as if playing a game.  Watching them, I thought about the four species of crows I have seen in Lancaster County over the years.        Various species of the crow family are adaptable and adjusted well to the human-made fields, suburbs and shopping areas we created.  These related birds are intelligent, black all over and utter similar calls, sometimes making them tough to identify.      The southern population of American crows nests across much of the United States.  In spring and summer, I see several pairs of them in farmland and suburbs foraging for food and raising young in tall trees in both built habitats.  Later, I see some of the family groups foraging for food together in the field...

      Four kinds of small birds, including Louisiana waterthrushes, rough-winged swallows, Acadian flycatchers and eastern phoebes, have characteristics in common because of the nesting habitat they share along streams in eastern North America woodlands.  That habitat molded them to be as they are.      These small birds are brownish or grayish, which camouflages them along streambanks in shaded woods.  Two kinds utter loud songs to be heard above the musically-tumbling stream.  They all consume the abundant invertebrates that live along clear, flowing waterways, and feed those critters to their young birds in their nests.  But they catch those critters in different ways, which reduces competition for food among  them, and helps make them be distinct species.       Waterthrushes seek invertebrates under stones along stream shallows and their gravelly edges.  They even flip some stones over to look for invert...

      Sour cherry, black mulberry and shad bush trees bear fruit in June in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, as elsewhere in the eastern United States.  One afternoon early in this present June, I drove around a corner in New Holland in Lancaster County and noticed two sour cherry trees loaded with lively, beautiful American robins ingesting the red fruits of those trees.  And there were seven or eight other, handsome  robins on the ground that were also consuming fallen cherries.  What a lovely picture those robins made.        Sour cherry, black mulberry and shad bush all have pretty blossoms in April, which are pollinated by honey bees and a variety of other kinds of early insects.  The trees' fruits grow in May and ripen early in June, to the delight of black bears, white-tailed deer, rodents, raccoons, American robins, starlings and other species of berry-eating birds, box turtles and several other types of creatures. ...

      Some bird ballads in southeastern Pennsylvania in summer are beautiful beyond words.  Songs of male birds proclaim territory, repulse other males of the same kind and attract females of each species to the males' territories to raise young.  And those same bird ballads make times outdoors more enjoyable and inspiring for us.  Following are some of my favorite bird songs in southeastern Pennsylvania.  These species are adaptable and common, which benefits them and us.      The short, soft warbles of male eastern bluebirds are lovely, and soothing to hear.  One can hear their pretty notes and admire their strikingly blue and rusty feathering, as they look for nesting cavities in abandoned woodpecker holes, or other tree hollows, or nesting boxes erected for them, in which to raise young.  These bluebirds prefer weedy habitats in farm country in which to raise offspring.  I first heard and saw these lovely birds searchi...

     Red-winged blackbirds and cattails go together like peas and carrots and peanut butter and jelly. Red-wings mostly nest in cattail marshes, large and small, and also among tall grasses and ten-foot-tall phragmites.       Red-wings are striking birds.  Males are jet-black with red shoulder patches.  Black is an intimidating non-color that repulses other male red-wings from each other's nesting area.  And black helps chase away crows, hawks, mink, house cats and other kinds of predators that might consume young red-wings.  The red epaulets are displayed when the wings are raised as visual threats to other male red-wings when each male sways on top of a tall, wind-blown plant and repeatedly sings "kon-ga-reeeee" to establish his "ownership" of a patch of cattails or reeds".  Male red-wings also regularly dive-bomb and swoop ferociously at predators to scare them away from their mates' nurseries, and the young sheltering in th...

      There are several kinds of sunfish native to North America, but pumpkinseed sunfish and long-eared sunfish are the prettiest, to attract the finny girls for spawning.  And they are handsome and interesting to us during summer.       Being closely related, the striking males of these species look much alike with wavy, light-blue lines on their gills, a black flap protruding from the end of each gill, blue freckles on their flanks and orange bellies.  But pumpkinseeds have a red spot at the rear of each gill, which long-ears don't.  And the slightly larger long-ears' longer black extension of each gill is partly surrounded by a thin, white, curved line.      Look-alike females of both kinds are less colorful than their mates.  And each female has faint, wavy, light-blue lines on their gills, and highly visible, vertical, dark bars on their flanks that camouflage them, which is important because females lay the egg...