natureswondersbyclyde

      One late afternoon in the middle of December, 2022, I was sitting in a car in the parking lot of a shopping mall waiting for friends.  Suddenly, I saw a little whirlwind of birds flitting and scrambling low to the blacktop, right beside the car I was in.  They were house sparrows, looking for edible tidbits from careless shoppers among parked cars.  When something edible was found, several of those little brown birds would flutter to that food and compete vigorously with each other for it.      Although American crows, ring-billed gulls, rock pigeons and starlings can also be spotted looking for food on parking lots at times, that afternoon I saw only house sparrows.  But they put on a show.      We have a suburban lawn full of house sparrows the year around; which is fine with me.  Some people don't like these weaver finches from Eurasia that were introduced to the United States over a hundred years ago.  But I do.  They liven human-made habitats in cities, suburbs and farmy

      Whenever we drive on expressways in the Middle Atlantic States, I watch for wild birds and mammals on the grassy shoulders of those broad highways, and in the air above them.  And I always see at least a few adaptable species on every trip.        All species appear to be used to the traffic whizzing by.  Each kind has a reason for being near those expressways that are potentially dangerous to wildlife.  And those critters add interesting life where we don't think it would exist.       It's exciting to see flocks of majestic Canada geese feeding on short grass in expressway cloverleafs where they are away from speeding traffic.  And it's thrilling to see their airborne, bugling gatherings parachuting down to those grassy cloverleafs to feed.      Flocks of post-breeding starlings land on the edges of expressways and their cloverleafs to get food.  They quickly walk about and rapidly poke their sturdy beaks among roadside gravel and short grass to pick up seeds, invert

     Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge in the Central Valley of California is particularly intriguing in autumn when several kinds of handsome waterfowl gather on its shallow impoundments to rest between feeding forays.  And I saw several other interesting species of birds and mammals in this refuge in the fall of 2022.  All that I enjoyed through a live camera and our home computer screen.       Hordes of beautiful northern pintail ducks daily rested on the refuge's impoundments from mid-October into winter.  The slender, striking drakes have chocolate, white and pale-gray patterned feathering, and long, thin tails, which are unique to puddle ducks.  Female pintails are also slim, and have camouflaged brown and speckled plumages.      But pintails' courtship flights in fall, winter and early spring are their most interesting and entertaining characteristic that sets them apart from their relatives.  Four or five male pintails gather around a female on water to court her.  An