natureswondersbyclyde

     Great egrets and snowy egrets are elegant in spring and summer with their immaculate white feathering and long, luxurious, white plumes that indicate their breeding readiness.  These stately, related birds are over three feet tall and almost two feet high respectively, and have long legs for wading in waterways and impoundments and long necks to reach out to snare frogs, tadpoles, crayfish, small fish and other prey.  And they both have long, pointed beaks they use to grab their victims.        Great egrets have black legs and yellow bills while snowies have black beaks, black legs, but yellow feet, like golden slippers.  Those differences, plus sizes, identify these magnificent birds from each other.       These majestic egrets begin nesting early in spring, mostly in the wetlands of the southern United States.  But by July, many post-breeding individuals of both kinds drift north to find fresh fishing...

     Four eastern members of America's wren family, Carolina, house, winter and marsh, are feisty, energetic, adaptable, interesting and entertaining.  Descended from a common ancestor, they all have traits in common.  They are all shaped the same, sport short, upright tails, are seldom still and have brown feathering with darker markings that camouflage them.  They all dine on small invertebrates year around, and males of each kind sing boisterous songs.  And they all inhabit the Middle Atlantic States at some time of each year.          However, each wren species traditionally inhabits a niche different than that of its relatives.  Carolina and house wrens nest in bottomland woods.  Carolinas raise young in nurseries among log, brush and rock piles while house wrens hatch offspring in abandoned tree cavities.  Today Carolinas also hatch babies in garages, under decks and porches, in outdoor grills and othe...

     Purple martins, barn swallows and chimney swifts are adaptable enough to almost completely shift from natural nesting sites in the eastern United States to human-made ones, because those built structures have been available in abundance, and just as protective as natural ones..  Their shift probably increased the populations of each species because there are far more built places to nest in than natural ones.  And, happily, there are more flying insects, particularly flies, for these species to eat in summer in farmland and cities than there were in natural habitats in the past.      These three kinds of small birds summering in North America to raise progeny are similarly built for life in extended flight.  They all feed on the wing; catching flying insects as they speed and swoop, high and low, across the sky.  There they are entertaining to watch.           But these birds don't compete for nesting s...

     Gray as the shadows in the thickets of shrubbery and vines they lurk in, gray catbirds are one of three kinds of mimics in the eastern United States, which also includes northern mockingbirds and brown thrashers.  These related bird species are so-named because catbirds and mockingbirds imitate sounds they hear, including bird songs.  One might think they are listening to a whole yard full of different kinds of birds, only to realize later they are really hearing one catbird or mocker.  These three kinds of mimics also have other characteristics that make them feathered characters.      These eastern mimics live and nest in dark, protective thickets on lawns, in hedgerows between fields and along woodland borders with fields, where they also procure much of their food of invertebrates during summer.  And each type of mimidae has its own niche in thickets, which reduces competition for food among these related species.  That sep...

     Over several years, I've seen female box turtles and female snapping turtles laying eggs in holes they dug with their hind legs in loose soil in June.  And yesterday, June 5, 2024, for the first time, by a live camera on an osprey nest and our computer screen, I saw several female diamond-backed terrapins digging holes and laying eggs in a vacant lot of sand in a housing development on Long Beach Island, a barrier island between Barnegat Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.  I saw some female diamond-backs plodding across a salt marsh to get to that sandy lot to lay eggs while other females were trudging back to the bay after laying their eggs.  It was an arduous, dangerous venture for all those terrapins because they had to cross a road to get to their spawning grounds.      Interestingly, a few women were helping terrapins cross the road, both ways.  And when a female terrapin was done digging with her back legs and laying eggs, one of the...

     When I was a boy, for a few years my family rented a house for a week each year in Margate City, New Jersey to experience the ocean and beach.  During the long, summer evenings, however, I walked to Egg Harbor to see the beauty of it.  While there, I saw one or two gull-sized birds, silhouetted black before the sunset, flying back and forth just above the water's surface, each one with its lower mandible an inch in the sky-reflecting water and cutting it as they strongly, and gracefully, beat their wings in flight.  I later learned those fascinating, beautiful birds, that I enjoyed seeing, were black skimmers that were catching small fish that bumped their lower mandibles poked in the water.      Black skimmers and American oystercatchers are unrelated birds that have similar characteristics, including living and nesting along the Atlantic Coast.  Both species rest on beaches and mud flats.  Both hatch young in shallow scrapes ...