Marcia Bonta

  • 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…

  • Early Spring

    Instead of April showers last year, we had unprecedented heat.  On April 2, it was 80 degrees Fahrenheit.  Flowers and trees bloomed days and even weeks ahead of records I’ve been keeping since 1971. By the middle of the month, we had a May woods.  Even the mayapples bloomed in April. During the first half…

  • “Her Management is Beauty”: In Defense of Unmowed Lawns

    It’s mid-August, and I’m driving across the valley through walls of corn.  Occasional fields are mowed clean for the second time.  The only habitat left was along the roads, and the township mowers have cut that as well.  I wonder what happened to the eastern meadowlarks I heard singing in the spring, or why the…

  • Talking with Chris Bolgiano about nature writing and the environment

    Check out the two-part conversation between Marcia and her friend Chris Bolgiano, a naturalist-writer from the mountains of western Virginia, at the Woodrat Podcast: Part 1, Tales from the Nature-Writing Trenches, and Part 2, Greening the Appalachians.

  • The Green House

    To stay or to go.  That was the dilemma we faced.  We weren’t getting any younger, and my husband Bruce could no longer maintain our mile-and-a-half, steep mountain road, ten miles of trails, barn, shed, 1865 guesthouse, 1873 main house, and garage by himself. Bruce also needed help keeping our tractor and secondhand bulldozer running. …

  • In Search of Silence

    Ever since I read about Gordon Hempton’s One Square Inch of Silence project, I’ve been more keenly aware of our noisy world.  Hempton, a sound ecologist, has been recording natural sounds for decades.  Nicknamed Sound Tracker for his recordings, he laments that every decade our world becomes noisier.  While city dwellers are acutely conscious of…

  • An Enigmatic Warbler

    “Wee, wee, wee, wee, bzzz” sings my favorite yard bird.  For two months most years — mid-May to mid-July — the male cerulean warbler sings his monotonous song from dawn until dusk. The first year this happened, back in 2002, I worried that he hadn’t found a mate.  Why else would he sing on and…

  • Hiking the Ghost Town Trail

    No trace of December’s snow remained. “It might as well be spring,” I thought as I hummed the lines of an old song. But it wasn’t spring.  It was January 7 and a balmy 60 degrees.  Seduced by the perfect day, my husband Bruce and I set out to hike portions of the Ghost Town…

  • Golden Eagle Redux

    In case you’ve been wondering about the photo of me in the sidebar, here’s the story, from my November column in Pennsylvania Game News. The phone rang just as we were in the midst of eating dinner. “I’ll bet that’s Trish and she’s got an eagle,” I said. Bruce answered the phone. “You’ve got an…

  • Mountain Meadows

    Imagine receiving a gift of 113 acres on Tussey Mountain.  That’s what happened to Mike and Laura Jackson back in 1988 when Laura’s parents, Richard and Phyllis Hershberger, gave them a portion of their farm.  The Jacksons named their property Mountain Meadows and built a home with large windows for wildlife viewing. Part of the…

  • Making Connections

    Our plane dropped through the momentary hole in the clouds and made a perfect landing on the St. John’s runway. After a day’s delay, because of fog, we had finally arrived in Newfoundland. Place of my dreams, this island in the sea is halfway to Ireland. And yet here is where our beloved Appalachian Mountains…

  • Flying Monkeys

    Crows acting up, by Greg7 “Why don’t you just shoot them?” That’s the reaction of most homeowners when Grant Stokke asks permission to live trap American crows in their backyards. But he hastens to add that they do give him permission. Stokke is a graduate student who is working with Dr. Margaret Brittingham, professor of…