natureswondersbyclyde

      Ovenbirds, wood thrushes and brown thrashers nest in woods and thickets in Pennsylvania, and throughout much of the eastern United States.  And while nesting there, these species of unrelated song birds feed mostly on invertebrates they catch on forest floors.        Interestingly, these three kinds of birds that share woodland nesting habitats have brown feathering on top, but white underparts, streaked with black spots.  Those plumage color patterns on both genders of each species camouflages them on woodland floors of dead-leaf carpets as they feed.         Each of these woodland species has its own niche, which allows each one to raise young in much the same environments as the others, with minimal competition for food.  Ovenbirds, which are a kind of warbler, generally nest in drier, maturing oak woods.  They place their unique, dead-leaf nursery on the dead-leaf-covered ground.  Each pa...

      Laughing gulls' black heads and incessant, laughing cries are abundant summer icons along Atlantic Ocean shorelines.  And, happily, those in-your-face gulls are everywhere along the Atlantic Coast- in salt marshes where they nest, on salt backwaters and channels off the ocean, sandy beaches, mud flats and boardwalks, and in towns on barrier islands along the ocean's shores.  But they seldom venture inland.  And they drift south in fall.        Thousands upon thousands of striking, loudly-calling laughing gulls arrive at their protective, tall-grass salt marshes, sprawled between barrier islands and the mainland along the Atlantic Coast by mid-April, and form breeding colonies of hundreds of pairs in each colony.  Amorous gulls pair off and court loudly with seemingly unending, laughing cries.  Each pair then makes a grassy nursery on slightly higher ground under tall grasses, where each female lays three olive or buf...

      I was walking along a hardly-used road in the wooded Welsh Mountains of eastern Lancaster County one afternoon in early June to enjoy nature.  I casually looked into a shallow trickle of clear water flowing by that road and saw a motion that looked like a small fish.  I thought no fish could live in that one-foot-across rivulet, but I looked at the spot where I saw the movement with an eight power pair of binoculars.  Immediately, I was treated to good looks of three male and one larger, chubbier female black-nosed dace cavorting in that trickle.  The slimmer, two-and-a-half-inch males had orange front fins and a deep-yellow stripe above and below a black bar on each side of each male.  The female only had a black stripe on each of her flanks.  I knew then that the cavorting in the clear shallows was the little fish spawning eggs.      I thought those dace got into that tiny trickle when it was bigger after pouring rain....

      Long Beach Island is a long, narrow barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay along the New Jersey seacoast.  That bay, like all backwaters off oceans, has salt water.  And Barnegat Bay stretches 42 miles, north and south,  between some of Jersey's protective, mostly-sandy barrier islands and its mainland.  Barrier islands protect backwaters, salt marshes and the mainland from the wind-driven ravages of the ocean.          Harvey Cedars is a town on Long Beach Island.  And that town stretches across the barrier island, from ocean to bay.       A small, remnant salt marsh lies between that town and Barnegat Bay.  A freshwater stream flows through the marsh and empties into Barnegat Bay.  That stream attracts several kinds of thirsty, salt marsh and bay birds the year around.  Small fish live in the stream and phragmites and clumps of tall grass grow along the st...