RECREATIONAL PARK NESTING BIRDS

     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 young.  They all feed invertebrates to their babies.  The striking red-headed woodpeckers, interestingly enough, are partial to totally dead trees in meadows in which to create their nursery cradles.  One pair adapted to raising a family in a cavity they created in a dead tree in a back corner of a lawn.               

     A pair each of a variety of cavity-nesting birds, including house wrens, Carolina chickadees, white-breasted nuthatches, eastern bluebirds, tree swallows and great crested flycatchers, have hatched youngsters in abandoned woodpecker holes, other tree hollows, or bird boxes, in the park.  The big surprise to me was the pair of crested flycatchers in a hole in a tree on the lawn.  Those birds generally raise young in woods.  

     As usual, the most interesting pairs of cavity nesters to me were the chickadees, tree swallows and bluebirds that reared babies in bird boxes erected on the edges of a lawn, the chickadees near a patch of trees and the swallows and bluebirds more in the open lawn near shrubbery.  The trim tree swallows are interesting to watch cruising low and swiftly over open areas to catch flying insects.  And the bluebirds are always beautiful as they drop from twigs to catch invertebrates in the grass.     

     The variety of flycatcher species, including eastern phoebes, great crested flycatchers, eastern kingbirds and eastern wood pewees, nesting in this park were interesting to me because of how they adapted to different niches so they can live together with minimal competition for flying insects, their main food.  

     Each kind of flycatcher has reason for being in that park.  A pair of eastern phoebes were there because of a pavilion located in a stand of shade trees near the stream.  Phoebes traditionally nest on rock ledges, under overhanging boulders near waterways in woods.  But this flycatcher species has adapted to many similar, but human-made nesting habitats, including the support beams under the roofs of pavilions in woods.  A pair of eastern kingbirds were there because they catch flying insects in open areas, but nest in a large tree among scattered trees in meadows.  And pewees nest in woods and some wood lots in farmland.  Male pewees sing a plaintive, lovely and repeated "pee-a-weeeee", particularly at dusk.

     Song sparrows, northern cardinals, gray catbirds, American goldfinches and indigo buntings nest in the minimum of shrub and tangled vine thickets in the park, and along some edges of it.  The sparrows and cardinals are permanent residents in those thickets, but catbirds are the most common birds in them during summer.  

     Song sparrows are becoming like shorebirds, in that they regularly search for invertebrates to eat from the muddy borders of streams and ponds.  

     Male cardinals, goldfinches and indigos are the beauties in thickets.  Cardinals liven those thickets early in spring with their cheery, chanted songs that ring out so all can hear. 

     And there are some other bird species that nest in various niches in this park.  American robins are common on the lawns where they raise young in younger trees and ingest invertebrates from the lawns.

A couple pairs of Baltimore orioles build swaying cradles on the tips of twigs on the lawns while cedar waxwings also rear young in some of those same trees, but near the waterway where they catch flying insects in mid-air.  And a wood throush can be heard singing its lovely, flute-like song from back in a remnant woods.  

     This recreational park is loaded with nesting birds, and other adaptable wildlife, as most parks are, if the wildlife has food, cover and nesting areas in those parks.  Observant people enjoy the wildlife while those creatures have additional homes rather than being chased away because of a lack of food and shelter.  Concern for wildlife needs is always a win/win situation.