Marcia Bonta

  • Vernal Pond Adventures

    Once again I’m sitting beside our mountaintop vernal pond and wondering if this will be the year the wood frogs will make it out of the pond before the water disappears. A wood frog’s life span is about seven years, and for six years the pond has dried up before the wood frogs’ have fully…

  • A Balmy March

    Ah March! How eagerly we await it as we look for signs of spring between blasts of freezing winds and occasional warm days. On one windy day in mid-March, the first returning turkey vulture flies along Sapsucker Ridge. A calm, warm day brings back a singing field sparrow or eastern phoebe. As the earth thaws,…

  • Valentine Eagle

    Trail cam photos of the golden eagle at the spruce grove bait pile (email and RSS subscribers may need to click through to view the slideshow) “Can you identify this bird?” The question came to me via email last Valentine’s Day from our caretaker wife, Paula Scott. Accompanying her email was a photo from one…

  • Black-legged Ticks

    This marks the 20th anniversary of my column for the Pennsylvania Game News. The first appeared in January 1993 and concerned the Carolina wren. Thanks for reading! —Marcia Last January I walked along the Black Gum Trail. Since our son, Dave, constructed the trail halfway up Laurel Ridge, back in the 1990s, I had never…

  • The Longest Autumn

    Every autumn the first hard frost comes later. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, when we were engaged in intensive gardening, we could expect a hard frost in the first week of October. Gradually, as the years passed, the hard frost date arrived in the second week. Then, in this century, it moved into…

  • White-Crowned Sparrows

    The white-crowned sparrows must be wondering about our strange weather. Last October, near the end of their fall migration, they were met here by a heavy snowstorm. For the first time I can remember, we even had a white-crown at our feeder area from October 31 through November 2. Usually, I see them during their…

  • The Migration of Common Green Darners

    After a hot, humid day in early September, a large swarm of common green darner dragonflies hunted for food above the barn bank. Our son, Dave, had alerted me to the phenomenon, and we stood watching as the dragonflies darted about. Dave tried to catch one in my insect net, but every time he zigged,…

  • Visit from a Hairy-tailed Mole

    Here’s the video our son Dave made of our hairy-tailed mole. Listen for a cardinal cheering, the calls of eastern wood-pewees and eastern towhees, train whistles, and a loud plane going over as well as vehicles from the interstate as background sounds. On a cool, clear morning in late August, my husband Bruce came rushing…

  • Connecting Wild Lands

    In the midst of the worst heat wave last July, we were asked to host John Davis, who wanted to camp out on our property. Son of Mary Byrd Davis, author of Old Growth in the East: A Survey and editor of Eastern Old-Growth Forests: Prospects for Rediscovery and Recovery, Davis is as committed to…

  • June Surprises

    June is often the most exciting month of the year. Then I can count on close encounters with black bears on our trails. Not only are last year’s cubs on their own, but their mothers are being hotly pursued by eager males. We also add new species to Bioplum, a natural inventory of our property.…

  • Louisiana Waterthrush

    Sometime in early April, I hear the ringing song of a Louisiana waterthrush near our Plummer’s Hollow stream. One of the first neotropical migrant birds to return, he comes winging in from as far south as northern South America and southern Cuba. This handsome brown warbler, his whitish breast streaked with brown, looks more like…

  • The Joy of Trail Cams

    All photos and videos in this column are from trail cams on the mountain placed and monitored by the Scotts. (If you’re reading this via email or in a feed reader, you may have to click through to see the videos.) Almost as soon as they settled into their new home, back in 2009, our…