Marcia Bonta

  • Living with Bears

    Over the years I have had numerous close encounters with black bears, and not once have I felt threatened. That is as it should be according to black bear researcher Benjamin Kilham. He has been studying black bears in the field and raising orphaned cubs at the behest of the New Hampshire Fish and Game…

  • April Songster

    Sometime in late March or early April, the first male field sparrow (Spizella pusilla) of the season sings his long down-slurring whistle that ends in an accelerating trill. Soon he is joined by other returning males, and our 37-acre First Field rings with their lovely songs.

  • The Ides of March

    For Caesar, it foretold the day of his assassination. For me, the 15th of March may be a bright, sunny day foretelling spring, a blizzard concluding winter, or, most likely, something in between. So it was on March 15, 2013.

  • Ghost Bird

    A leucistic creature is white or pink all over, its eyes are usually blue, and it has little ability to produce color. Another source says a leucistic animal is not pure white, its pigmentation is diluted, and its plumage is lighter than usual but not pure white. David Bird, an ornithologist, recently defined leucism as…

  • Superflight

    It began with red-breasted nuthatches. In early August 2012, one of the largest irruptions of this northern species in living memory started with reports from counties in eastern Pennsylvania. By the end of November unprecedented numbers were recorded in all 67 counties in the state. In late September the first purple finches arrived in Pennsylvania…

  • Mindful Creatures

    Scientists interested in cognitive ethology have begun to study learning in vertebrate and invertebrate animals, bolstered by the work of neurobiologists, who have discovered that any animal with loops between thalamus and forebrain is a conscious thinker. Birds, mammals, and reptiles all have such loops.

  • Surprise Visitor

    Sometimes we have unexpected visitors to our mountain dooryard. Last December 6, shortly after lunch, my husband, Bruce, stepped outside on our veranda. That was when a mink bounded past almost at his feet and down into the lilac shrubs next to the house. “I think I just saw a mink,” Bruce shouted to me…

  • Putting Up the Feeders

    I only put the feeders out as early as November because I am a veteran Project FeederWatch participant, having signed on for this citizen science project, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the first year it was offered. Last fall was its and my 26th season, and it began on November 10.

  • Chickarees

    Having moved from Maine, where we had lived in the country for five years and hiked in our mixed conifer woods filled with scolding red squirrels, I had no idea that central Pennsylvania had marginal habitat for them. But over our 41 years here, after the two attic squirrels were eliminated, I had had only…

  • Vulture Days

    Last September once again I missed International Vulture Awareness Day. That was on September 7 and my husband Bruce and I were celebrating our fiftieth wedding anniversary in the province of Quebec. Specifically, we were sitting six feet away from the largest common gannet colony in the Western hemisphere, watching them fighting, mating, tending young,…

  • The Value of Aging Trees

    On a hot July day, I sit beneath a large red oak, nestled into a deep buttress, one of several that flare out from this 200-year-old tree. The ground beneath the tree is littered with old acorn remnants as are the bases of the other elders in this stand of deciduous trees. Protected as a…

  • 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…