ENJOYABLE APRIL EVENINGS

      Warm, sunny April evenings are enjoyable in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  Increased sunlight each succeeding day and warm, gentle breezes, filled with the scents of flowers and mowed grass, and the sweet songs of birds, help make those evenings wonderful to experience in one's own lawn or at a park in Lancaster County.  And, for me, it is thrilling to be by a local, wooded bottomland and listen to the soul-lifting sounds of spring, as the sun sets and the beautiful evenings slowly give way to darkness.

     In April, the lovely blossoms of dandelion, blue violets and other prostrate, lawn plants bloom beautifully on lawns and fields, and along country roadsides, enhancing those human-made habitats.   Many evenings we see wood chucks and cottontail rabbits enthusiastically nibbling leaves and flowers of those adaptable plants.

     Meanwhile, male mourning doves, American robins, northern cardinals, house finches and song sparrows on lawns sing lovely, mingled tunes to establish territories and attract mates, one for each male.  Females of each of these lawn species build grass and twig cradles in shrubs and young trees.  

     Soon after sunset, little brown bats come out of their daytime retreats to swoop and zig-zag swiftly after flying insects to eat.  They are seen as black silhouettes erratically swirling, here and there, through the air, as darkness gradually, quietly, closes in.

     Red maple trees in local, bottomland woods bear innumerable and attractive red flowers in April, which are most lovely before soft, warmly-colored, sunsets.  Pools and lush-green patches of skunk cabbage leaves dot some of the bottomlands under those red maple canopies.  There, day and night, through much of April, large gatherings of male spring peeper frogs and several male American toads peep and trill respectively, to attract females of each species' kind into the pools to spawn.  I thrill to hear the wild, piercing dins of those two kinds of male amphibians chorusing together in the gathering darkness of evening.  Theirs is a wonderful, primeval concert of the long ago age of amphibians.  

     While the amphibians call out, male robins and white-throated sparrows sing beautifully in nearby shrubbery, adding to the amphibians' wild pipings.  Sometimes, I hear the loud honking of a pair of Canada geese nesting nearby.  Or I might hear the "beeping" courtship of a male American woodcock on the ground, or his vocal singing high in the sky during lulls in the chorusing of peepers and toads. 

     During evenings late in April, I hear the haunting, flute-like notes of male wood thrushes "a-o- leeee"and the sweet, slow whistles of wood pewees, a kind of flycatcher, "pee-a-weeee" drifting out of some local, bottomland woods.  Both those beautiful songs tug at my "heart" and make me believe in a Higher Power.            

             

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