natureswondersbyclyde

     Today, retention basins are required by law in the United States.  They are designed to control storm-water runoff, and retain soil.  These human-made basins are like shallow ponds, except some basins aren't always filled with water, making them more like wetlands.  Still, clumps of cattails, certain grasses, arrowhead plants and other kinds of emergent plants grow in many retention basins, providing food and shelter for a variety of adaptable, water-loving creatures, particularly in summer.      Mallard ducks and Canada geese raise young on and around some retention basins.  The ducklings swim as a group across the water and mostly consume protein-filled invertebrates.  Goslings, however, ingest tender alga, duckweed, grasses and other kinds of vegetation, as do their parents.  There is little competition for food between these species of related waterfowl.      Pairs of red-winged blackbirds hatch babies in grassy nurseries attached to cattail stalks above the normal water l

     This summer, I have repeatedly visited a 23 acre recreational park in Lancaster County farmland to learn what kinds of birds are adaptable enough to nest in a heavily used park.  This park has remnant deciduous woods, a stream, lawns dotted with several tall black walnut, honey locust and sycamore trees, thin strips of tall reed canary-grass and small thickets of vines and shrubs.  And this park is surrounded by croplands, wood lots and pastures.  This habitat diversity, most of it human-made inside the park, and bordering it, provide food, shelter and nesting sites for a variety of adaptable, nesting birds in spite of human activities.  Indeed, the birds seem to get used to people in the park, as long as those birds are not harassed, which they aren't.      As might be expected, downy, red-bellied and red-headed woodpeckers raise young in this park.  These woodpecker species each chip holes into dead wood in trees in the woods and on the lawns to create nurseries for their yo

     Part of this June and July, I have been watching many thousands of sockeye salmon, by live cameras and our home computer screen, leap up a six foot falls on Brooks River in Katmai National Park in southwest Alaska.  The salmon left the Pacific Ocean, where they grew large, to swim upriver to the shallow, rock-bottomed streams, where they hatched, to spawn.  As they push upriver, their grayish body scales change to red.  And these millions of sockeye salmon are parts of several food chains, a few of which involve brown bears, glaucous-winged gulls, bald eagles, gray wolves and ravens, which are clearly visible on our computer screen.       About 2,200 brown bears live in Katmai Park, and many, if not all, the adults catch and eat sockeyes during that fish's run upriver.  Bears snare salmon all along Brooks River, including below its falls and just above them.  Adult male bears get prime places at the falls where concentrations of salmon are thickest.  And some salmon accidental

     The Wetlands Institute is six thousand acres of salt marshes and tidal channels near Stone Harbor, New Jersey.  I've been to those wetlands in years past, but during the summer of 2020, I have viewed them through the Institute's live cameras and our computer screen at home, seeing many of the same birds I saw when I was there in person.        The protected salt marshes and tidal channels at the Wetlands Institute represent salt marshes and channels along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of North America.  Barrier islands of beaches protect those marshes and backwaters from pounding ocean waves, making them valuable to a variety of wildlife, from fish to fiddler crabs and egrets.      Every summer, a large colony of laughing gulls nests among tall grasses on the marshes of the Wetlands Institute.  To me, the boisterous and black-headed laughing gulls are the icons of  summer North Atlantic shorelines.  They are the most noticeable of birds in the salt marshes, and daily seen f