Marcia Bonta

  • Golden Eagle Days (Part 1)

    “I think that the Bald Eagle Ridge is the single best place in Pennsylvania to observe golden eagles,” Mike Lanzone told us. He was talking about our mountain, which is the westernmost ridge in Pennsylvania’s ridge and valley province. Lanzone is the Assistant Field Ornithology Projects Coordinator for the Powdermill Avian Research Center. He, along…

  • Sy Montgomery books for kids

    I have read all three of the books by Sy Montgomery in the Houghton Mifflin “Scientists in the Field” series for kids in the 9 to 12 range. They are excellent. All have wonderful photos by Nic Bishop that accompany a fascinating text. The Snake Scientist discusses the thousands of red-sided garter snakes that hibernate…

  • Grasslands of Central Pennsylvania

    On a day in late August, members of the Pennsylvania Native Plant Society visited what ecologist Roger Latham calls “wild-ungulate pastures” in Clearfield County’s Quehanna Wild Area. Latham, who has been working on a meadow and grass inventory of Pennsylvania, was searching for “meadows and grasslands that have persisted for a long while and for…

  • Life at a Vernal Pond

    It was not the year to observe our vernal ponds. But how was I to know that? After two years of more precipitation than usual, all the depressions on top of Sapsucker Ridge beneath the oak and black cherry forest had filled with water. In late March, I counted four ponds. Three of them were…

  • Mad Marmots

    “Danger–Mad Marmot” warned the sign on the laboratory door. Inside stuffed woodchucks and other woodchuck memorabilia cover Stam Zervanos’s desk and study area. Zervanos, a biology professor at Penn State University’s Berks-Lehigh Valley College near Reading, has been studying woodchucks, the least social of the marmot genus, for eight years. As a physiological ecologist, he…

  • A Natural Heritage

    “I’m too old for this,” I think as I follow Jessica McPherson up and down the steep banks of Bob’s Creek on State Game Lands 26. I am also severely sleep-deprived and only sheer adrenalin keeps me going. But I am determined to keep up with McPherson, a woman four decades younger than me and…

  • Little Loggers

    Last winter I spent more time watching meadow voles beneath our feeders than I did birds. The heavy snowfall in early December provided perfect cover for them and when most of it melted later in the month, the voles’ runways were easy to see. Several voles had nests near our feeders and often their dark…

  • The Biodiversity of Lake Pleasant

    On a bright, breezy day in early June we paddled a canoe around Lake Pleasant, one of eight glacial lakes in northwestern Pennsylvania.  Despite its prosaic name, the 64-acre lake in eastern Erie County has more natural diversity along its shoreline, in its surrounding wetlands, and in the lake itself than any other lake in…

  • Firefly Magic

    Warm July nights are lit by a sea of blinking firefly lights. To my undiscriminating eye, the flashes seem to be random. But scientists studying fireflies are able to tell most species apart by the pattern, rhythm, and color of firefly flashes. That is also the way fireflies themselves identify their own species. Such knowledge…

  • Saving Box Turtles

    Imagine digging a trench for a box turtle enclosure in one hundred degree heat! That’s what an army of volunteers did back in July 1999 at the Buttermilk Hill Nature Sanctuary in northwestern Pennsylvania. “It took an hour to dig a yard,” Dr. William Belzer of Clarion University told my husband Bruce and me when…

  • Nature’s Ultimate Bankers

    It’s late January as I crunch over frosty, fallen leaves on my way to Coyote Bench. Almost immediately I hear the high-pitched whine of a female gray squirrel in a mating chase. Four male squirrels are after her, but one male fends off the others. Once the female turns and faces him at the end…

  • Summer’s Fiddlers

    He stalked through the grasses, ears cupped, head down. Then he squatted, still listening and looking. Steve Rannels was pursuing crickets and katydids behind the Middle Creek Management Area’s Visitors Center. My husband Bruce and I had been fascinated by the compact disc Rannels, Wil Hershberger and Joseph Dillon had recently released entitled “Songs of…