Pennsylvania Game News - December 2016 - 50

ours with a fence until it rises above deer
level.
Those are the bad changes, but we
still have more than 200 species of
wildﬂowers, 150 of which are natives.
Wood nettle, which ﬁrst appeared
back in 2006 along our stream, has
rapidly spread in the woods, creating
a thick cover that keeps stiltgrass out.
Jewelweed, also called touch-me-not,
does the same where it is allowed to
thrive. And the tree species that still are
disease-free, including white and red
oaks dating back to 1812, are growing
larger every year.
Since we moved here, songbird numbers have been cut in half throughout the
continental United States.
Even though we provide nesting
habitat for at least 71 songbird species,
we have far fewer of most species, such
as wood thrushes.
We have lost golden-winged warblers, despite perfect habitat at the edges
of First Field.
Habitat loss on songbird nesting and
wintering grounds has been, and continues to be, a major problem.
In the heavily populated eastern U.S.,
roaming domestic cats, window strikes
and, lately, the many wind-energy installations on mountaintops and along
the Great Lakes are killers of migrating
birds.
The wind farms are hard on our
dwindling bat population, especially our
cave bats, which are already dying from
white-nose syndrome, brought here less
than a decade ago from Europe, where
bats have built up a resistance to the
disease over many centuries.
Last summer, I talked to a woman
who turned an old Victorian mansion
50

into a tea house and bed-and-breakfast.
She and her husband were tenderhearted
enough to shoo the occasional bat out
of their house instead of killing it, but
they had no idea about the disease killing bats.
When I gave her the statistics, though
- 99 percent of most cave bats dead and
the disease spreading rapidly across the
United States and Canada - she was
appalled.
When she learned a female bat has
only one pup a year, she understood
why most scientists believe it will be
500 years, if ever, that cave bats will
recover the numbers they had before
the disease, and that some of the already
rare species, such as Indiana bats, soon
might be gone forever.
Still, through this litany of loss, I
have seen terrific success stories in
Pennsylvania, and many are due to the
work of the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
Back in the 1970s, '80 and even
'90s, seeing an osprey, peregrine falcon
or bald eagle was a rare and treasured
experience.
I remember visiting Haldeman Island
and watching Game Commission workers feed the young bald eagles they'd
release in hopes eagles would thrive and
again breed in Pennsylvania.
I also watched biologists monitoring
peregrine falcons breeding on bridges
over the Delaware River.
Today, you can watch peregrines
nesting in our cities on webcams, and
see ospreys and bald eagles in many
areas of our state.
A couple summers ago, while hiking at a nearby state park, Bruce and I
watched an osprey catching ﬁsh in the
lake. And a pair of bald eagles now nest
at the other end of our mountain. This
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pennsylvania Game News - December 2016
