natureswondersbyclyde

     Recently, I was driving along a country road in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and enjoying the beauty and lushness of trees, meadows, field corn, soybeans and roadside flowers along the way.  At one point, I drove between long fields of tall corn on both sides of the road, creating a tunnel without a roof, except the sky.  Tall grasses and flowering plants vegetated the roadsides between the blacktop and the corn.  Small groups of stream-lined purple martins and barn swallows flashed over the corn fields and the road to catch and eat flying insects, as I cruised by.  Those two local, post-breeding swallow species were gaining fat and strength for their meandering south to avoid the northern winter and find food in warmer climes.  Their gatherings are one of the first signs of the coming autumn.        Little gatherings of house sparrows hopped along the edge of that road to eat weed and grass seeds, and insects.  These permanent resident sparrows, and the swallows, do not compet

     While watching birds on Lake Onalaska, a lake off the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, via a live camera and our home computer screen, I heard the "snoring" courtship calling of leopard frogs in shallow water.  I also saw a great blue heron stealthily stalking on its long legs through those shallows after prey animals to catch and consume.  Step by slow, careful, step, the heron eased forward, occasionally stopping to watch intently for its next victim.        Suddenly the great blue thrust its long neck and formidable beak forward and down with lightning speed and grabbed a leopard frog in its bill.  The frog momentarily struggled to get loose, but the heron repeatedly clamped its mandibles on it, quickly killing it.  Then the heron gulped its victim down, whole and head-first.        A dramatic scene, and one that shows the hazardous lives frogs, and other small creatures, lead.  No wonder each female frog spawns hundreds of eggs every year.        Frogs are preyed on b

     Several acres of human-made habitats just outside of New Holland, Pennsylvania are inhabited by several species of adaptable wildlife.  This environment is composed of two quarter-acre retention basins filled with cattails, overgrown fields, thickets, and pin oak trees planted on a large, regularly-mowed lawn, all on former farmland.  Lush and lovely in its greenness during summer, this built environment provides food and shelter to the attractive and interesting wildlife adjusted to it, as long as it remains at least partly overgrown.      Many kinds of wild plants and animals survive in less than ideal conditions, such as this habitat outside New Holland.  Each type of habitat has its own community of adaptable vegetation and wildlife.  And each wild plant and creature is adjusted to a particular niche that meets its survival needs.  It's amazing and enlightening how many intriguing species of plants and critters have adapted to human-made habitats.  Nature quickly restores

     For an hour and a half, in the middle of June of this year, I visited a 200 yard, slow moving, stretch of a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania creek to look for wildlife.  I've stopped there in summer before over the years to experience wild creatures, and saw a few elegant white-tailed deer, mink, muskrats, appealing wood duck families, basking painted turtles and fishing belted kingfishers, to name a few kinds.  Creeks in farmland, such as this one, are oases of water, and creekside thickets of tall weeds and grasses, shrubbery and trees; places where wildlife finds shelter and food, without interference from plowing, sowing, and harvesting crops.        During that hour and a half visit, I saw some of the same interesting wild animal species I've seen before along that part of the creek.  I experienced over a dozen airborne rough-winged swallows, a few nesting red-winged blackbirds, a few pairs of gray catbirds, several croaking male green frogs and a pair each of Baltimore