natureswondersbyclyde

      Atlantic menhaden, a pelagic, schooling kind of fish related to sardines, anchovies and herring, are reported to be "the most important fish in the sea".  Adult menhaden are streamlined, silvery, and can be up to fifteen inches long.  And they live abundantly along the Atlantic Coast, including in estuaries, harbors and the mouths of rivers from Nova Scotia to Florida.      Menhaden are omnivorous filter feeders.  Tightly-packed masses of them cruise slowly through salt and brackish water, each fish with its mouth open to strain plankton and algae that is free in the water.  Special adaptations on the gills of these fish filter out those edibles, and oxygen, from the water as they pass through it.  And menhaden filter the water as they feed, helping keep it clean and healthy.             Menhaden are an important link between tiny bits of plankton and upper-level predators in several food chains.  Various kinds of gulls and terns catch and eat younger, smaller menhaden,

     During late summer and into autumn in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland, many country roadsides that aren't regularly mowed are jungles of adaptable and common, tall vegetation, including grasses, weeds and flowering plants.  And some of those "jungles" stretch for many yards along the roads, and between blacktop and crops such as corn, soybeans and alfalfa.        Those long, lean strips of high grasses and weeds along rural roads are alive with small, adaptable wildlife, including butterflies, grasshoppers, field crickets, and bees.  Those pretty and interesting little critters get food and shelter in those roadside jungles through summer and fall.        Foxtail, wire, Timothy and redtop grasses are loaded with seeds that will feed field voles (mice) and seed-eating, farmland birds, including various kinds of sparrows and finches, rock pigeons and mourning doves, and horned larks during fall and winter.        But in late summer and autumn, differential, red

     Several years ago, I dug a hole in the ground between a tall pussy willow bush and a forsythia in our suburban yard in southeastern Pennsylvania.  I placed a 100 gallon, plastic fish pond in that cavity under the shade of that shrubbery.        Over the years, several other kinds of vegetation grew around that pond, including a wisteria, a few rose-of-Sharon bushes and a deadly nightshade vine.  And an English ivy vine crawled up and spread across the pussy willow.  That ivy begins to bloom early in September.  Although that jungle of greenery around the pond is trimmed back every year, it still is about twelve feet across and approximately forty feet in circumference.      On the sunny afternoon of September 4, 2021, we were sitting on our back deck, which is about thirty feet from the pond.  The rose-of-Sharons and English ivy were blooming and the ivy blossoms were swarming with small insects there to sip nectar.  Looking at those flowers, and the green foliage among them with

      Lake Onalaska, a shallow back-water off the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, which I have been viewing daily by a live camera at the lake and our computer screen, is a bonanza of handsome water-birds from mid-July through August.  It harbors birds of several kinds in great numbers, which creates lots of daily activities during late July and through August, on water and mud, and in the trees and sky.        Part of a wildlife refuge, this vast lake has several shallow channels, broad mud flats, lush marshes of tall grass, cattails and phragmites, arrowhead and purple loosestrife, and islands of willows and other kinds of floodplain trees.  Mats of alga and duckweed clog standing water here and there between mud flats.  Lotus lily pads and pale-yellow flowers and pickerel weeds with stems of pretty, purple blooms emerge in places from shallow, standing water.  And wooded hills rim that whole river backwater and its islands, making the scene look much like the days of American Indian