[music playing] Hi, I'm Alex.

Welcome back to A Season at Shaver's Creek.

Fall is a time of year when a lot of our wildlife is pretty active in getting ready for winter.

Or they could be moving south to warmer climates.

This season didn't disappoint us.

We saw some new species that showed up, and we saw some familiar favorites too.

Let's take a look.

[music playing] This being our fall episode, I thought it might be fitting to start off with this video of one of our wild turkey flocks.

Now, it's possible that these are some of the same turkeys that we saw passing through last season, and you can see the juveniles are approaching their adult size.

And by the time you see this episode, it's pretty likely that some of these young turkeys have left to find or form other flocks.

Now, of course, we had to check back in on our great blue heron this season.

And once again, these birds have showed us just how impressive a predator they are.

I'm pretty constantly surprised by their patience, their skill, and the size of fish that they're able to pull out of Shaver's Creek.

And I think it speaks a lot to their resilience and how that species has really successfully weathered some of the most widespread habitat challenges of the 20th century.

[music playing] I always really love seeing this species.

The American woodcock is a really endearing little worm-hunting shorebird that boasts one of the most amazing and mating displays that I've been lucky enough to see in person.

Pennsylvanians can see these migratory little beauties from early spring until late fall.

Now, I couldn't quite make out what this little eastern screech owl had caught.

But seeing that it's in the middle of the creek, I'm pretty sure it's a crayfish.

Despite their name, this owl species doesn't really screech.

But they do have a couple of calls-- one kind of sounds like a trilling whistle, and the other one sounds a lot more like a whistled horse whinny.

We had our first mink sighting in a while, and I always enjoy seeing how agile and inquisitive these little weasels are.

We had a few black bear sightings this fall.

There's quite a few bears that live in the surrounding forests, but we pretty rarely see them because they try pretty hard to avoid human interaction.

I was impressed by the antlers on this 10-point buck that passed through our meadow.

Antlers are actually really interesting.

It's the fastest-growing type of bone.

And during the peak growth season, antlers of a deer can grow up to a quarter of an inch in a single day.

In this winter, this deer is going to shed his antlers, dropping them from his head with a really strong shake-- where other wildlife, like rodents, might find them and gnaw on them for the calcium.

Scent and smells are important tools in the animal world.

And you can see the moment that this bobcat sprays the plants on the left side of the trail to mark its territory.

Now, just a few hours later, this red fox showed up, and it caught the scent of that bobcat.

It's likely useful information for this fox to know that there's another predator somewhere in the area, and it's probably pretty close by since the scent is so fresh.

Now, this was a new woodpecker to our cameras.

This yellow-bellied sapsucker passed through, likely on its way south for the winter.

We were also given a good look at this male pileated woodpecker as it hopped along our log, searching for insects to snack on.

You can tell that it's a male from that little red streak on its cheek.

On females, that streak is all black.

And if you listen closely, you can hear another woodpecker right above off camera, knocking chunks of bark off the tree to find any critters that might be beneath.

[music playing] This belted kingfisher dropped its catch.

But luckily, the log was there to save its meal.

And I think that this is a female from the rusty red band across its belly.

But immature kingfishers also look deceptively similar.

Either way, it's a great look at a really skilled hunter at work.

Belted kingfishers are known to stun or dispatch their prey by smacking them off of whatever they're perching on.

I think that this kingfisher was probably looking to remove the claws of the crayfish, so that it would go down a little bit more smoothly.

Now, at first, this might look like a black vulture, but it's actually an immature turkey vulture who doesn't yet have its red head.

When it spreads its wings, you can see, underneath, it's got silvery white feathers that extend all the way across the bottom half of both wings.

Where on black vultures, it's only the feathers at the very tips of the wings that are white.

Now, we used a different view of the same log to give us this look at a porcupine waddling across.

Porcupines rely mainly on their senses of smell, touch, and hearing for navigation because their eyesight is not very good.

But this porcupine kind of shows that, as it's walking across, it walks right into a leftover branch stub that's right in its path.

This was one of the first times that we've seen gray foxes on our cameras.

And these foxes are often a little bit smaller than red foxes.

And they're actually the only wild canid in North America that's able to climb trees.

We had another barred owl sighting this season.

And again, it looks like it's holding something in its beak, but it's a little bit too close to the camera to make out what it caught.

These stealthy predators, they live all around the wetlands at Shaver's Creek, but they're pretty rarely observed during the daytime.

I'm looking forward to hearing their calls at night, which usually ramp up a lot during their mating season, which, at Shaver's Creek, we might hear as early as Valentine's Day.

Thanks for joining us for another exploration of fall at Shaver's Creek.

I hope you enjoyed our wildlife as much as I have this season.

Keep an eye on our website for what we have upcoming, and we'll see you next time.

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