natureswondersbyclyde

      As we sat on our deck in suburban New Holland, Pennsylvania at dusk on a May evening, I suddenly remembered, with pleasure, the gentle, beautiful songs of male wood thrushes and eastern wood pewees at twilight in June, in the forests of Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania.  I was a teenager the first time I heard them from an upstairs bedroom in a Mt. Gretna cottage.  The windows were open and the birds seemed to be singing from right outside them.  Each bird of both species repeatedly sang their heavenly songs until dusk became darkness in the woods.  And I have enjoyed those wonderful songs most every spring and summer since.       The lovely, clear notes of the wood thrushes sounded like fairy flutes- "eeee-o-llaaaa" or aaaa-o-lleeee".  Those pure notes from feathered, spot-breasted flutes floated lightly,  chorus after delightful chorus, through the darkening woods.          But the quiet, drea...

      One morning in spring, some years ago, I was walking through a soggy, bottomland woods near a creek in Lancaster County, Pa.  I noticed a pile of fine sawdust on the dead-leaf-covered ground under a dead limb of a tree,  Looking around, I noted a big black carpenter ant spitting sawdust out of a quarter-inch hole at my eye level in that dead bough.  Ant after ant took turns spitting sawdust out that hole as they chewed the dead wood in that branch to make tunnels and chambers for eggs, pupae and adults to live in there in relative safety.         I stopped to watch those busy ants for awhile.  And they were still working when I left their tree home.  Later, I became interested in the life history of carpenter ants in their dead wood niche in moist woods.      Sterile, female worker ants are a little less than a half inch long, and black.  They create tunnels and galleries inside dead trees, stumps...

      In the last several years, since the fur market is nearly non-existent because of the work of animals rights people, I've been thrilled to see many wild mink, male and female, along waterways in southeastern Pennsylvania.  Mink numbers apparently increased with much less trapping pressure.        Mink are a semi-aquatic member of the weasel family, having the long, thin bodies of weasels, and quick, untiring actions of weasels.  And mink have the same fierce predator attitude of all members of its family.              The first mink I saw was a female running along the Cocalico Creek near Ephrata in mid-March several years ago.  Naturally, I was excited to see her bounding along that waterway on some kind of a mission.       That same spring, I saw another female mink weaving quickly along a stream near Reinholds, and another female bounding across the New Holland Pik...

      Lawns in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania are full of adaptable life early in May, making them interesting to experience.  One needs only to step out of their house onto their lawn to see adaptable plant and animal life in abundance.      At this time, red maple trees and elm trees are loaded with multitudes of small, winged seeds that drop from the trees and twirl away on the wind from those parent trees.  One-inch-long, red maple seeds each have a tree embryo at one, swollen end and a veined, thin wing on the other end that carries the embryo away on the wind.        Each flat, round and light-beige elm seed has a bump in its papery middle that houses the embryo tree.  These seeds resemble half-inch wafers.      Shimmering beautifully in sunlight, thousands of these petite, attractive seeds of both kinds act much like snow falls.  They swirl down in big numbers onto lawns in a few days, drift...