Marcia Bonta

  • The Amazing Mayapple

    After twelve years, the first mayapples bloomed inside our three-acre deer exclosure. Almost as soon as we put the fence up in March 2001, mayapple leaves popped up in the lower, wet, wooded section of the exclosure. But they were single leaves, not the double leaves with a notch in the middle from which a…

  • Wildflower Drive

    A chorus of birds greets me this cool, foggy day — song sparrows, eastern phoebes, dark-eyed juncos, robins, and northern cardinals — all predictable on the tenth of April. And then, from the top of First Field, the imitative song of a brown thrasher unwinds. At last a sign that this late spring is underway.…

  • Wildflowers of a June Forest

    Now that the flush of forest spring wildflowers has passed, it’s easy to overlook most of the late bloomers.  Yet our June woods produce some lovely native wildflowers, beginning with the pink lady’s-slipper. Although it starts to bloom in mid-May, it holds its single crimson-pink slipper for three weeks.  The pink lady’s-slipper orchid (Cypripedium acaule)…

  • A Wild Resource Festival

    Thunder rumbled ominously as my husband Bruce and I rushed to join Dr. Jim Bissell on a Dune Walk at Presque Isle State Park.  Under a lowering sky spitting rain, we waited anxiously at Beach 10 Parking Area.  Cars pulled in and out, but no one arrived for the 10:00 a.m. field trip.  Then, Bissell…

  • Talus Slope Life

    Late in March, I ease my way down to the talus slope in an attempt to escape female ticks eager for blood to nourish their eggs. I’ve never been surefooted, so, clutching my walking stick, I only go far enough out on the rocks to escape the bloodsuckers. Luckily, the March wind is blowing, which…

  • The Tree of Great Peace

    The Iroquois called it the “Tree of Great Peace.” Its cluster of five needles to a bundle represented the five nations of the Iroquois and its spreading roots, reaching east, north, west, and south were the roots of peace that extended to all peoples. We call this tree, more prosaically, eastern white pine — Pinus…

  • Grasses Wear Robes

    We never get very far when we go on a Pennsylvania Native Plant Society field trip.  But we always learn and see more than we bargained for.  Take the grass field trip to Rothrock State Forest in central Pennsylvania that my son Dave and I joined last July.  Let by Sarah Miller of the Penn…

  • Return of the Shrubs

    The good news is that our shrub layer is making a comeback in some places.  The bad news is that most of the shrubs are growing in places inaccessible or inconvenient to deer. Take common elder.  When we first moved here, 36 years ago, a line of common elder shrubs grew behind a barberry hedge…

  • What’s in a Name?

    After a brief walk on a cold and dreary January day, I curled up in my study and tried to update Bioplum, a natural inventory of our property. Last spring I had finally identified a nondescript-looking wildflower spreading along our roadbank as Pennsylvania bittercress (Cardamine pensylvanica), and I wanted to add it to our list…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Continental Habitat Islands

    Bob Gruver held the small snake by the back of its head as we gathered around to look. The owner of the shale barren we were exploring, John Cantrell, was aghast. “That’s a copperhead,” he said. “No, no,” Gruver answered. “Look at the turned-up snout. This is a young hognose snake.” The rest of us…