Marcia Bonta

  • They Came and They Went

    It took house finches almost 43 years to make it from Jones Beach, Long Island, where birders identified the first wild eastern house finches, to our mountaintop in central Pennsylvania, even though they had been frequenting bird feeders in nearby valleys for seven years. I know the exact date the first house finches appeared at…

  • Important Bird Area #32

    We stood on our front porch counting birds last Fourth of July. In the dawn’s early light, my son Dave timed me while I named the birds I heard or saw in three minutes–wood thrush, American goldfinch, indigo bunting, American crow, common yellowthroat, Carolina wren, yellow-billed cuckoo, chipping sparrow, blue-gray gnatcatcher, field sparrow, white-breasted nuthatch,…

  • The Piney Tract

    “Tsi-lick” went the Henslow’s sparrows. From every direction, they called as the cold wind swept over the prairie. Only it wasn’t a prairie. It was a rolling, brushy grassland in Clarion County called the Piney Tract. Also know as Mt. Zion, it is now officially State Game Lands 330. My husband Bruce and I were…

  • Crusader for Birds

    Two deer heads and three guns mounted on his study wall prove that he was once a hunter.  But a sign “I’d rather be birding” and the sheer number of bird paintings and paraphernalia in his modest country home signal his first and abiding love. Ralph K. Bell of Greene County has led a bird-obsessed…

  • Where Have All The Birds Gone?

    Where Have All The Birds Gone? ornithologist John Terborgh asked in his book back in 1989. I was reminded of his question early last October when I noticed that the migrants were few and far between and the woods strangely silent. Then the National Audubon Society released its State of the Birds USA 2004 report.…

  • Chasing Breeding Birds

    “You know you’re getting old when you start repeating yourself,” I thought when I first heard about Pennsylvania’s Second Breeding Bird Atlas project. “Been there, done that,” I said and immediately signed up last spring and became the “owner” of the two blocks that include our property. The same, yet different, is probably an apt…

  • Return to Enlow Fork

    I never expected to be conducting a choir of American toads at Enlow Fork. After all, this state game land (#302) in southwestern Washington and Greene counties is better known for its incredible diversity of plants and birds. Yet there I was, on the first day of May, surrounded by singing toads as I sat…

  • Manure Chasing

    Every winter we spend at least one cold day on a manure chase. We hope to find Arctic-tundra and grassland-breeding birds–specifically horned larks, Lapland longspurs, and snow buntings–that sometimes spend their winters in Pennsylvania farm valleys. These seed-eating birds feed on fresh manure because it contains seeds that have passed through the digestive systems of…

  • An Irish Spring

    “I wake and hear it raining.” So begins Mark Van Doren’s wonderful poem “Morning Worship” and so began many of my mornings last spring. Van Doren goes on to list the wonders of the natural world he would miss were he dead, praising all the “sweet beings” that he knows will outlive him–mountains, huge trees,…

  • Cooper’s Hawk Redux

    Back in mid-March 2002, our hopes were high.  Our son Dave reported the loud “cak-cak-cak” dawn calling of a pair of Cooper’s hawks in the woods above the guesthouse.  Day after day despite cold, misty rain, and even a snowstorm, the couple continued vocalizing.  Near the end of the month they started refurbishing an old…

  • Waxwing Winter

    On a catch-your-breath cold morning in mid-January, I walked for a mile in silence. Only when I reached Coyote Bench did the forest come alive with music and color. A flock of cedar waxwings, whistling while they worked, harvested wild grapes from vines directly above my head. They look like perfect ladies and gentlemen in…

  • Tinkerbells of the Bird World

    Day after day in late May, an unfamiliar bird song that I heard as I walked through our Norway spruce grove haunted me. Then, on May 30, I finally identified the singers. Golden-crowned kinglets! And the female had nesting materials in her beak. Bold and cheerful as chickadees, golden-crowned kinglets are smaller, more elfin and…