natureswondersbyclyde

      We spent a couple of days along the Rappahannock River on the Northern Neck peninsula in northern Virginia during the end of July, 2026.  The Northern Neck has a beautiful, rural countryside of meadows, soybean and corn fields, and patches of deciduous woods.  But of most interest for me those two days was the Rappahannock and its wildlife.      All the birds I saw along that river were large and obvious, and catchers of fish.  But they snare fishy prey in different ways and seek them in a variety of sizes, all of which reduces competition among those river and impoundment birds, allowing them to live together in harmony.        I saw one or two each of great blue herons, green herons and great egrets from that house along the Rappahannock.  All those birds perched handsomely on docks and pilings in the river, and stealthily waded on long legs along the shallow shores of the river to catch fish.  Each ...

      Scientists claim that over many millions of years, whales evolved from a kind of land-based, bear-like creatures that slowly adapted to getting food from the oceans, becoming the mammals they are today.  And it seems that, early on, sperm whales diverged from the baleen whales to take advantage of different food sources, other than the baleens' sieving tiny plants and animals from the oceans' surfaces.  Sperm whales evolved different mouth structures and habits than baleen whales, to hunt giant squid, octopi, sharks, rays and larger fish in cold, dark, crushing ocean water over a half mile down.  Sperm whales have 52, cone-shaped teeth on their narrow lower jaws that catch the animals listed above, just like bears and wolves do.        Sperm whales are unique.  They are the only whales that adapted to diving so deep to get food, a practice that took eons to perfect.  They are able to stay submerged for up to two hour...

      Every July, in recent years, through live cameras and our computer screen, I watch several brown bears catch many mature sockeye salmon swimming up Brooks River in Katmai National Park in Alaska to spawn.  That park is in southern Alaska, at the base of the Aleutian Island chain that juts into the northern Pacific Ocean.         After a few years feeding on small creatures in the Pacific Ocean, hordes of sockeyes swim along the Alaskan Coast until they smell the river they hatched in.  Then they tirelessly push up the river {Brooks River}, day after day, by the hundreds of thousands to the gravelly shallows where they hatched.  They wiggle over rocky shallows, leap ten foot waterfalls and slip swiftly through deeper waters to reach their destination.  But many salmon don't make it to their spawning spots because of the unceasing predations of brown bears.           Brown bears compete with ea...

      Tiger and zebra swallowtail butterflies, monarch and red admiral butterflies and buckeye butterflies have large, colorful wings that make them quite visible sipping nectar from alfalfa and red clover flowers, roadside flowering plants and blooms in backyard gardens in southeastern Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, particularly from mid-July to the middle of September.  Use a field guide to eastern butterflies to see the colors and patterns of these beautiful butterflies.       These common, showy butterflies, my favorites, pollinate those blossoms as they sip nectar, and flutter daintily from one flower to another.  And in that process, they help beautify and enliven the hay fields, roadsides and gardens they patronize to get nectar.  And these kinds of butterflies, like all species, have interesting life histories.          Tiger swallowtails are yellow with black stripes on their wings.  Their caterpi...

      Presumably having a common ancestor, all woodpecker species have similar characteristics, including stiff tail feathers that prop them upright on vertical tree trunks, two toes in front of each foot and two in back that allow them to cling to tree bark and dead wood, and prop themselves upright at the same time, and heavy, sharp beaks that chip into bark and wood after invertebrates, and to carve out hollow to raise young in.  And they have attractive feather patterns.        But some kinds of woodpeckers have other food sources, including white-headed woodpeckers and acorn woodpeckers that hail from the American west.  Other food sources decreases competition for food among the adaptable, worldwide woodpecker family of birds.  White-headed and acorn woodpeckers diverged from other woodpecker species by ingesting different kinds of "nuts" from trees.      White-headed woodpeckers have black body feathers and whi...

      I recently became aware, by a TV program of giant South American river turtles living in the large Orinoco and Amazon Rivers in the tropical Amazon Basin of northern South America.  And what impressed me the most about these giant river turtles is the annual gathering of hundreds of female turtles on gigantic flats of soil during the annual drought when river water levels drop dramatically.           Those female turtles come together on the flats to lay their eggs at one time in the two and a half foot holes they dug in the soil with their back feet, one per turtle, on a bit higher part of the large, drying flats.  Each female lays about a hundred eggs in the pit she dug.  Digging a nursery hole a little uphill helps insure the turtle embryos don't drown before they hatch.  Perhaps, in the past, through trial and error, the river turtles that may have deposited eggs to close to the river have no descendants today be...