natureswondersbyclyde

      During March and into April of 2021, I had been watching migrating birds stopping at Lake Onalaska, a lake off the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, which is part of the Mississippi Flyway, through a live camera and our home computer screen.        Lake Onalaska was mostly frozen early in March.  But as soon as the ice started melting close to mid-March, the lake, and the sky above it, became full of handsome, graceful, north-bound birds of several kinds.  Every species of bird has unique beauties and intrigues.  Each kind is built for what it does in its unique niche to get food and raise young.          It was interesting to see several majestic bald eagles arriving on Lake Onalaska in mid-March to join relatives who wintered there.  And it was intriguing to see some of those eagles jumping on thin ice to break it and extract dead fish from it.        By the second week of March, several stately sandhill cranes returned to Lake Onalaska's many shallows, mud flats and grassy i

     Ospreys and broad-winged hawks are diurnal raptors that migrate through southeastern Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, in April.  Both hawk species are looking for nesting places, the ospreys along rivers and large, human-made impoundments and the broadies in relatively large woods.  Ospreys migrate singly, but broad-wings move north in groups of varying sizes.      Both these kinds of hawks are most likely spotted about mid-morning on clear, sunny days when the sunlight heats bare-ground fields, roads, parking lots and buildings, causing thermals of warmed air to rise up, pushing migrating birds upward as well.  The hawks come off overnight roosts in trees around the middle of sunny mornings and immediately feel for thermals.  With little effort, each bird swirls up in the thermal to gain altitude.  It swirls higher and higher in the rising, warmed air as far as it can, then peels off to soar along, mile after mile.  Gravity pulls each raptor down, bit by bit, so the birds must find a

      On April 8, 2021, I drove through our suburban area in New Holland, Pennsylvania and continued on in farmland, and along a creek in a 200 acre woodland.  On that warm, sunny day, I drove by lawns, cropland roadsides and fields, all human-made habitats.  My whole tour was a total of 16 miles, round-trip.  And along the way I saw many lovely, inspiring signs of spring as a result of longer periods of daylight per day, each succeeding day, and increased warmth.       Short grass on lawns and rye (another kind of grass) in fields were greener and more lush than in mid-March.  Those grasses create lovely, green carpets that are appealing to people because the green represents life and growth, which is essential to peoples' emotional well-being after a long winter.       Garlic with grass-like, dark-green shoots reached above the grass on lawns, fields and roadsides.  Related to onions, garlic has a strong, onion fragrance that is most noticed on mowed lawns.        In early-April,

      Sometimes at any time of year, when driving through my home town of New Holland, Pennsylvania, I am happy to see a Cooper's hawk zipping swiftly across the street.  Or I might see a Coop dash through our suburban neighborhood after a mourning dove or house sparrow.      Or I'll be excited to see a handsome red-tailed hawk perched on the tip of a tall tree or circling over our neighborhood.  Either way, the hawk is watching for gray squirrels.  And once in a while in bed at night, I'll be thrilled to hear the boisterous hooting of a pair of great horned owls in our yard.       The beautiful Cooper's hawks, red-tailed hawks and horned owls evolved in woods and the edges of woodlands.  Today they are also common, year around residents in many older suburbs, with their many tall deciduous and coniferous trees, throughout much of North America.  And all these adaptable raptors help make the suburbs a bit more wild and interesting.        Suburbs are human-made habitats