natureswondersbyclyde

     The South Carolina seacoast has 34 barrier islands and beaches.  Fortunately, 21 of them are either undeveloped, or have few structures and human activities on them.  Limiting human activities on those islands and beaches is beneficial to a variety of shore birds because so many other ocean beaches are devoted to human recreation, which is not conducive to birds' activities.         Deveaux Bank is a 25-acre, alluvial, barrier island composed of sediment carried by the Edisto River in South Carolina and dropped at the river's mouth where it pours into the Atlantic Ocean on the South Carolina Coast.  This little island has been a bird sanctuary since the 1930's.  Though small, this shifting pile of sand and mud is big in migrant and nesting shoreline birds, including gulls, terns, sandpipers and pelicans, each spring and summer.  And, fortunately, most human activities are prohibited on Deveaux Bank, protecting those m...

      A bison waterhole in Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan Province, Canada is featured by live camera on computer screens.  One of several on the immediate dry, short-grass, northern prairie, that waterhole is small and shallow, but provides water for birds, mammals and insects.  I watched that waterhole, which is fed by springs and sporadic rainfall, and the surrounding prairie, from early June until mid-July.      A black-tailed prairie dog town, with several prairie dog residents, surrounds that bison waterhole.  Colonies of prairie dogs dig their own homes deep into the soil of the prairie.  And each burrow has a couple of exits so those rodents don't become trapped in their own abodes.  The camera shows the "dogs" moving about, eating grass and standing upright on the mounds to their burrows to watch for danger.  Coyotes and badgers, which I have seen around prairie dog homes by the live camera, prey on prairie d...

      For a couple hours one mid-afternoon in June of 2021, I visited a local factory's waste-water outlet that gushes into a clear tributary stream of Mill Creek in farmland a mile outside of New Holland, Pennsylvania.  I do that occasionally to see what aquatic creatures live in that cleaned waste water.           Using binoculars, I soon spotted some of those water critters, including bluet and black-winged damselflies, banded killifish, green frogs, a young snapping turtle and a couple of painted turtles.  I also saw a couple of muskrats, and a few types of birds adapted to farmland and streams, including a couple of red-winged blackbirds, a few American goldfinches and a pair of song sparrows.      Males of the two kinds of damselflies are beautiful perched on tall grasses that hang over the tributary stream.  The bluets are small and thin, but their light-blue coloring is lovely.  Black-winged damselfl...

     Several kinds of small, adaptable birds nest in suburban areas in southeastern Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in eastern North America.  Their raising young in those human-made habitats increases their numbers, and gives us suburbanites more enjoyment on our lawns.  All but one of those species ingest invertebrates in summer, and feed them to their chicks.        Four built habitats in the suburbs, including bird nesting boxes, buildings and planted shrubbery and trees, provide nurseries for these kinds of birds.  Downy woodpeckers chip nesting cavities in dead limbs of standing trees to rear offspring.  Scattered pairs of attractive Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, white-breasted nuthatches and house wrens hatch youngsters in abandoned woodpecker holes in the older suburbs that have larger deciduous trees that make those habitats look a bit woodsy.  And some pairs of all these bird species, except downies, lay eggs ...