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Those April Birds
Every April I expect more from the month than it gives me. It warms up and then it freezes. It rains then it snows. But through all the changes in the weather, spring forges ahead. Wood frogs mate in the mountaintop ponds. Spring peepers call in the First Field wetland. Best of all are the…
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Mid-March Migrants
March almost always comes in like a lion and often goes out like one as well. Last March was particularly brutal and windy with temperatures as low as seven degrees. An icy snow covered the ground and inch-a-half snows alternated with blue-skied deep winter days throughout most of the month. Despite the spring songs of…
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Disappearing Birds
Last February a hard crust covered the icy snow most of the month. That led to the highest number of common feeder birds I could remember since moving to our west-central Pennsylvania mountain home in 1971. One snowy dawn seven northern cardinals, instead of the usual pair, flew in together and fed from the red…
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Aeroecology
As the days shorten, birds begin to migrate long before cold weather sets in. I notice the first flush of migratory birds on our mountain sometime in mid-to-late August. But September and early October are the peak months here for bird migration. Now that they are on the move, birds enter the most dangerous phase…
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Purple Martins
One mid-July afternoon near our barn, our son Steve watched two purple martins insect-catching high in the sky. Several days before, down in nearby Sinking Valley, Steve had driven up a private road called Purple Martin Lane and found two large purple martin houses set up by a local Amish family. “There were at least…
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Surveying Breeding Birds
Ever since I began documenting bird species on our central Pennsylvania mountaintop back in 1971, bird numbers and species have been declining, not only here but throughout the world. Most of these estimates by scientists are based on a wide variety of bird counts and studies, especially in North America and Western Europe. But in…
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Moosic Mountain
Last May seven of us stood atop Moosic Mountain listening to the thin, quick, ascending notes of a singing prairie warbler. It was mid-afternoon after hours of pouring rain and the mountain was still swathed in fog. Six of us, Mike and Laura Jackson, George Mahon, Sam Dietz, Bruce and I, had traveled three and…
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A Loony Day
“This is probably as close to a red-throated loon as you’ll ever get,” my son Mark said to me. We were standing a mere 15 feet from a red-throated loon that was floating on the acre-and-a-half reflecting pool at the Penn State Altoona campus. The loon had been hanging out there since March 30, having…
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Hairy Woodpeckers
On a cold winter morning my husband Bruce and I were sitting in our kitchen and eating our usual Saturday breakfast of muffins and cheese omelets. I looked out our kitchen window and noticed two woodpeckers sparring on the trunk of the driveway black walnut tree. At first I thought they were our yard red-bellied…
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Winter Visitor
Near the end of January I swept our back porch clean of an inch of snow before spreading bird seed. Immediately a sparrow throng of dark-eyed juncos, white-throated, song, and American tree sparrows mobbed the porch. But one sparrow looked different from the rest and fed off by itself. Still, with its rusty-red cap it…
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The Life of a Sapsucker
Last November26, I walked into our sunroom. Almost immediately I spotted a male yellow-bellied sapsucker eating the fruit of one of two hackberry trees we had planted more than a decade ago. Also called “sugarberry,” it is known to be a favorite winter food for a variety of songbirds, most notably American robins and yellow-bellied…
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A Madness in the Sky
Sometime in late October or early November I hear and then see enormous blackbird flocks as they briefly land in our forest calling and feeding. Usually they consist of incredibly noisy European starlings and common grackles on their way South for the winter. I enjoy watching and listening to them as they engage in what…
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Marcia Bonta 