Marcia Bonta

  • 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…

  • Snowshoeing for Birds

    For twenty-five years I have gone out on foot to count both bird species and numbers for the annual Christmas Bird Count, popularly known as the CBC. But last December was a first for me. I did the CBC on snowshoes! I was thrilled by the deep snow and cold weather that had started with…

  • Thanksgiving Bird

    Ah! Thanksgiving. It’s usually one of my favorite holidays. I had baked the pies and cooked the cranberries the day before and, despite a crashing headache and nausea, had made the bulgur stuffing right after breakfast before crawling back into bed. A few minutes later our son Steve called to say that he and his…

  • 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…

  • The Black Cat Returns

    Most days I spend at least a couple hours walking in our woods. Unlike the nature shows on television, weeks can pass before I encounter, for instance, a mother bear and her cubs, a waddling porcupine, an unusual bird or plant, a bounding short-tailed weasel, a newborn fawn, or some other sighting that makes my…

  • 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,…

  • Green Immigrants of June

    In June our home is afloat in a sea of orchid or so it seems because dame’s rocket blankets the back slope. Locals call it phlox, but wild phlox is a native wildflower that has five-petaled flowers and dame’s rocket is a Eurasian immigrant with four-petaled flowers that forms a showy cluster along its two-to-three…

  • Mountain of Ice

    We awoke, on the sixth of last January, to a mountain of ice. All night long trees and branches crashed down as our thermometer probe, encased in ice, registered a steady 32.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That morning an icy mist of rain continued falling, and so did trees and branches. I sat at our bow window…

  • Another Batty August

    On a warm August evening, my husband Bruce and I sat in our living room, reading quietly. Suddenly, we were not alone. A bat, flying close to our heads, circled the room. Bruce called our son Dave up from the guesthouse to help shepherd the bat outside through the open front door, but it wouldn’t…

  • Dragonflying

    “Dragonflying is good for jaded birdwatchers. It presents new challenges,” Cynthia Berger told me as we watched darting dragonflies at Whipple Dam State Park one sunny day in late July. Berger is the author of Dragonflies, an excellent new book designed for beginning dragonfly-watchers. These “glittering aerial acrobats,” Berger writes in her book, are similar…

  • 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…

  • Blithe Spirit

    Spring came in on the March wind. The dawn chorus cranked into gear. Water streamed off the mountain and, in a few days, the snow and ice were gone. We were delighted to see bare ground again, but our granddaughter Eva was disappointed. Spring had long ago arrived at her Mississippi home. She had come…