NATURE IN A STREAMSIDE THICKET

     I stopped for an hour and a half one warm afternoon in late August, 2022, in a shaded spot under trees off a farmland road along a clear-flowing stream a mile south of New Holland, Pennsylvania to enjoy nature.  The stream was bordered for many yards on both sides by green, sun-filled thickets of shrubbery and young trees.  The stream and thickets together create a pretty wildlife oasis in manicured cropland.  

     Sitting in that one spot, I saw several kinds of wildlife going about their daily business.  A couple of gray catbirds and a northern cardinal were scrambling about in red-twig dogwood bushes and eating the dark-blue berries of that shrubbery.  A song sparrow hopped along a narrow, stream-side mudflat to consume various invertebrates.  He was hard to see because he was brown on brown.  And a little later I saw a few American goldfinches ingesting strands of algae from a shallow backwater with no current.  The males still had some striking, bright-yellow and black feathering.        

     I also noticed that tall, bushy spotted jewelweeds were sporting many orange flowers along the stream.  And several arrowhead plants had many white blossoms low on the water's edge.  Both these kinds of blooms helped beautify the lovely thickets.

     A few black walnut trees and staghorn sumac trees along the waterway each had a few striking yellow and red leaves respectively.  Fall is on its way.

     But summer's heat still prevailed in August, a month of much insect activity.  I saw a few yellow skipper butterflies zipping about and landing on foliage.  And a monarch butterfly sailed by on beautiful, orange and black wings.

     Meanwhile, I saw a few each of bluet damselflies and red bluet damselflies fluttering low over the stream and landing on foliage just above the water.  Two of the reds were spawning eggs into a slow part of the waterway.  

     A few digger wasps were sipping nectar from the tiny, lavender flowers of a peppermint plant near the waterway.  Diggers have shiny-black thoraxes and rusty-red abdomens.  Each female lays one egg on each of several beetle grubs they find in the ground.  Each wasp larva feeds on that beetle grub.

     But seven adult, female black and yellow garden spiders in a tiny, sunny clearing of tall grass in a thicket, right where I parked, were the highlight of that stop among thickets along a farmland waterway.  Each pretty spider was hanging, head-down, on the noticeable, white, zig-zag web down the middle of her large, orb web.  I've read that white webbing is noticeable to birds so they won't fly through the web, destroying it.  Zig-zag webs save the spiders some work.  

     Adult female black and yellow garden spiders have close to one-inch bodies, including the black and yellow abdomen.  Their eight, black and yellow, long legs make them appear even larger, and striking. 

     I saw only one garden spider at first.  But by looking, with the help of binoculars, I found another and another until I saw seven of them in a strip of tall grass only ten feet long; the most garden spiders I ever saw in one place.

     Sometimes, I have seen the large, orb web of a garden spider hanging from stems of tall grass early in a late-summer morning.  Then those webs are laden with dew drops that glisten in the low sunlight like millions of tiny diamonds, creating great beauty.

     Male garden spiders are much smaller than their mates, and each male creates a small web adjacent to a female's web. His only job is to mate with her.  Each female then spawns many eggs into a pouch under protective debris on the ground where the spiderlings hatch the next spring.  

     Female black and yellow garden spiders and their large, orb webs are beautiful during late-summer.  They are not always easy to find, but they are worth the search.  

            

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