natureswondersbyclyde

     During May of 2021, I watched huge gatherings of horseshoe crabs and shorebirds on the mud flats and gravelly shores of Mispillion Harbor in the middle of the western shoreline of Delaware Bay in Delaware.  I watched those great congregations of creatures through a live camera mounted near the Dupont Nature Center, and our home computer in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.        Horseshoe crabs are not crabs, but related to spiders and scorpions.  They are "primitive" relics from the long ago past and mostly unchanged since those ancient times.        Many hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs push up the sandy or gravelly beaches from Delaware Bay to spawn, day and night, during the full moon or new moon in May.  Each female "crab", and one or a few males attached to her, creep up the beaches like tanks.  And each female can spawn as many as 100,000 tiny, dull-green eggs in the sand or gravel of Delaware Bay beaches, including those in Delaware and New Jerse

     From the end of April to mid-May in 2021, I watched birds on Lake Onalaska, off the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, through a live camera mounted at the lake and our home computer screen.  I saw many of the handsome puddle ducks that were still on the lake since March.  Most of these ducks, however, will soon push farther north and west to their nesting territories.  And I saw several each of majestic American white pelicans, elegant sandhill cranes, swift tree swallows and immature ring-billed gulls still lingering at Onalaska since earlier spring.  These birds, too, will migrate farther north and west, except the ring-bills, and some of the swift-flying and graceful tree swallows that will hatch young in tree cavities around Lake Onalaska.        Around the end of April, flocks of  common shorebirds (sandpipers and plovers) began to arrive on the mud flats and shallows at Onalaska.  Groups of pectoral sandpipers were about the first species to stop off at Onalaska to feed on inv

      One day in May, 2020, my wife and I had lunch at McDonald's in New Holland, Pa.  Because of the pandemic, we dined in our vehicle in the McDonald's parking lot.  And during our half-hour stay in our car on that lot, we were entertained by a few kinds of common, adaptable birds, including a few each of house sparrows, starlings, purple grackles, a pair of northern mockingbirds, a pair of gray catbirds, a couple American robins and a male northern cardinal getting food from that lot and the short-grass lawn around it.  While watching those birds feeding in human-made habitats, I thought about how adaptable and successful in life those birds, and many other kinds, are because they make use of human-made niches, including those at many McDonald's restaurants, for example.        The house sparrows, starlings, grackles, mockers and catbirds were all scavenging crumbs from the parking lot while we were there.  Some of those birds were right outside our car.  The robins were

      Five species of spot-breasted thrushes in North America, wood thrushes, veeries, hermit thrushes, gray-cheeked thrushes and Swainson's thrushes, are related to American robins and sing the most lovely, melancholy of songs.  And they have other features in common, demonstrating their descending from a common ancestor.        All species of spot-breasted thrushes are about the same size, have brown feathering on top that camouflages them on dead-leaf-covered, woodland floors where they raise young and gather invertebrates to eat and feed to their babies in their leafy cradles.        The underparts of these thrushes are white with rows of dark dots that are similar among the five species.  They all rear offspring in North American forests, but winter in Central and South America.  And in May and June, males of these kinds of birds utter wonderful, ethereal concerts that touch the human soul with their pure beauty.  Their lovely songs are flute-like, almost other-worldly, that s