The colorful gray catbird

Here by the water, an unassuming gray catbird rests a minute from mewing.
For color, it could mimic the songs of many other birds, ever
contributing wonder to the sense of what we’ve heard.

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An encouraging find

One of Little Crum Creek’s native spring ephemerals, a colony of Mayapple
survives the smother of English Ivy to flower and start
some berries full of seeds for summer ripening.

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Hairy, bitter, & pretty

Around mid-March, hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsute) started showing lilliputian blooms in the lawns and borders of Little Crum Creek,

multiplying, through April, long capsules of seed above its leafy rosette,

so that, by May, it’s ripening fruit might be ready to burst and launch a hundred-fold patter of seeds at the slightest brush of a stepping foot.

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Thus comes beauty

One enlightening way

to welcome the start of spring…

follow a mourning cloak butterfly

through the sun of Little Crum Creek.

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A winter fisher

Summer’s dense foliage makes it tough to spot a kingfisher
as it rattles along the Little Crum corridor sounding the creek loudly for prey.

But the constant call of a female, tracing low flights over the water,
recently made like a beacon through the bare limbs of a bright January day.

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Pekin ponderin’

Last March I watched a solitary Pekin duck

make close friends with a mallard

before matting a bed of grass on the rocky banks of Ridley Park Lake.

The Pekin, I’ve read, is a domesticated mallard,
bred in China for thousands of years before it was brought to New York in the 187os.

Paddling through the winter lake,

some stick close together,

especially this group of five,

 which includes one duck curiously colored …
any ideas why?

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Update:  A reader’s close observations of these lake ducks lead me to agree that the the curious-looking gray one is, as she points out, an Indian Runner.  For more, see the comments by brookeduffy. Thanks, Brooke!

 

Gathers to a greatness

A few towns south of the water’s trickling spring, an illuminated fountain in Ridley Park Lake makes a holiday scene of Little Crum Creek.

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By yard and stream

Here by the autumn creekside,

a stealthy fox emerges from cover

to prey upon a squirrel

 that nimbly leaps away.

And here the next morning, back set to the sun, the fox bends to it again.

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Marbled orbweavers

September sun rising on the web,

a nearby male sets in shade,

and silk spun round a Rose of Sharon leaf

folds a female home.

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Whither thou goest

Before a Philadelphia gardener introduced China’s tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus altissima) to America in the eighteenth century,  ancestors of this colorful moth (Atteva aurea) likely remained in their native Florida and other points south.

But as tree-of-heaven spread, so did the moths, assuming the tree’s name when their caterpillars adopted its leaves as a food source.

Here now, not far from where Ailanthus altissima was introduced over 200 years ago, the autumnal pattern of an Ailanthus webworm moth complements bright clusters of white snakeroot along Little Crum Creek.

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