MY FAVORITE MONTH AND HABITAT

      My favorite Lancaster County, Pennsylvania habitat is thickets of shrubbery, young trees, vines, and tall grasses and flowering plants in hedgerows, and along the edges of rural roads, railways and woodlands during September.  For an hour every week, from late-August to mid-September, this year, I visited a quarter-mile thicket squeezed between a country road and a woodland to watch for nature's progression into autumn, and preparations for winter.  That thicket habitat is always interesting to study because of the ample food and shelter it offers wildlife the year around.  This September, it has a few kinds each of lovely wildflowers, pollinating insects, brightly-hued berries, colored leaves on deciduous trees, and migrating insects and birds.  

     The dominate trees of this thicket include black gums, red maples, tulip trees, pin oaks and white oaks, all being bottomland trees that do well in constantly moist soil.  And the gums, maples and tulip trees had some colored leaves when I visited that thicket, red on the gums and maples and yellow on the tulip trees, adding fall color and beauty to that thicket.   

     September is often characterized by cool winds and lower humidity, providing an enjoyable feeling of autumn, not felt during summer.  The wonderful look and feel of fall is invigorating, but fleeting and often melancholy, because it ushers in winter. 

     Patches of ten-foot-tall Joe-Pye-weeds, five-foot-tall, bushy spotted jewelweeds and four-foot Canada goldenrods dominate the flowers in that thicket.  All these beautifully-flowered plants are native to much of eastern North America.  

     Each Joe-Pye is topped by a few uniquely fluffy-looking clusters of dusty-pink flowers that are visited by larger, colorful butterflies, including monarchs, tiger swallowtails and spicebush swallowtails, that sip their sugary nectar.  In September, the monarchs are migrants, heading to Mexico to escape the hardships and chill of the northern winter. 

     Stands of bushy spotted jewelweeds, with their abundance of orange, cornucopia-shaped blossoms, are magnets to nectar-seeking bumble, honey and carpenter bees, and ruby-throated hummingbirds.  The hummers are migrants, heading to South America where flowers bloom year around.  Apparently, I only saw young or adult female hummingbirds because I've seen no red throats.  Perhaps the males go south before late August.  

     Hummingbirds are very quick at visiting jewelweed flowers and lapping their nectar.  These birds zip from bloom to blossom so rapidly they are often hard to follow with binoculars.

     Innumerable, tiny, yellow Canada goldenrod flowers squat along the plants' flower stems that look like  many golden fingers pointing.  Those lovely, miniscule blooms are swarmed by bees, small, skipper butterflies and other smaller insects to sip the blossoms' nectar, pollinating them in the process.       Tartarian honeysuckle and multiflora rose bushes both have ample red berries clinging to their twigs in September, adding more attractive color to this thicket through autumn and winter.  Those decorative berries are eaten by rodents, and American robins, cedar waxwings, starlings and other kinds of berry-ingesting birds through fall and winter.  The birds digest the pulp of those berries, but excrete the seeds far and wide across the countryside, this spreading both species across the landscape.    

     I always enjoy visiting thickets in fall because they are so lovely and intriguing.  And they are full of wildlife that make them even more interesting.  


            

           

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