natureswondersbyclyde

     Several kinds of flowering plants bloom beautifully through October in many of southeastern Pennsylvania's moist, grassy meadows no longer grazed by livestock.  Those pretty blossoms enhance the pastures, and provide food and cover for certain kinds of wildlife.  Asters with tiny, white flowers, asters sporting small, pale-lavender blooms, tall goldenrod plants that have tiny, yellow blossoms, red clovers with pink flowers and tall, spindly chicories that have sky-blue ones, in that order of abundance, dominate those meadows with their lovely colors during October.       The innumerable white blossoms of white asters dominate some pastures to the point that, from a distance, they look like snow fell only on those meadows.  Conditions must be just right in those meadows for white asters to be so overwhelmingly abundant.      Asters with pale-lavender blossoms dominate certain other pastures.  I think those asters have the prettiest of all local meadow flowers during October.  

     Though different species, black Jack, scrub and scrub chestnut oaks have several valuable characteristics in common.  These oaks are adapted to living in dry, rocky, barren soil where they forfeit richer soil to receive ample sunlight in habitats where few other trees shade the ground..  They also are early successional trees that colonize repeatedly burned-over or timbered-off, woodland habitats.  They help hold down and stabilize soil against wind and water erosion where few other plants are present to do that essential job.  They produce attractive acorns in those nearly sterile habitats where food for wildlife can be limited.  And they are small trees with contorted, picturesque forms and boughs that make them interesting to experience for themselves.  Their "skeletal" forms are best seen in winter when their foliage is on the ground.      The rustic acorns of these scrubby oak species are brown when ripe, and each one is seated in a pretty, little, cup-like cap.  Th

      Brown pelicans and American white pelicans live and nest in North America.  And although they are large and appear bulky on land and water, both species are elegant and graceful when in flight.  Their flight is beautiful, entertaining and inspiring, particularly when highlighted before a landscape or silhouetted against the sky.  Airborne pelicans seem to be works of art!      Being related, the relaxed, spell-binding flights of both kinds of pelicans are similar.  They fly in rows, lines or V's, with each bird evenly spaced among its fellows.  Pelicans in rows resemble chorus lines that often undulate from one side to the other as the birds alternately flap and soar together as if one.  They seem to rehearse their flight patterns.        Pelicans flying in lines follow each other with slow, measured flaps, as they sweep along rapidly, as if the birds are cars of a train on aerial train tracks.  Interestingly, a ripple in a line of flying pelicans caused by one bird going ove

     I have been watching water-loving birds on Lake Onalaska, a backwater lake off the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, via their live camera and our computer screen.  Most of the birds there are in flocks, making Onalaska loaded with feathered life during September into November.  Some species have been there all summer, while other kinds pour in from their breeding grounds elsewhere.        Non-breeding American white pelicans and double-crested cormorants were there all summer.  Both handsome species catch fish, but in different ways.  Pelicans form groups on the water to work together to herd small fish into shallows.  Then the pelicans dip their ample beaks and pouches into the shallows at once to scoop the fish into their pouches, straining water from their bills and swallowing their prey.      Cormorants dive under water from the surface and catch one fish at a time in their beaks.  They rise to the surface to swallow their victims.      The big, majestic pelicans are graceful i