Marcia Bonta

  • Golden Eagle Days (Part 2)

    Continued from November. photo by Todd Katzner Then came the great change. After a mild, misty start on December first, the thermometer hit 65 degrees and then began to plummet as the wind picked up. The northwest winds had finally arrived a month late and with it, the following morning, came the eagle researchers. They…

  • Golden Eagle Days (Part 1)

    “I think that the Bald Eagle Ridge is the single best place in Pennsylvania to observe golden eagles,” Mike Lanzone told us. He was talking about our mountain, which is the westernmost ridge in Pennsylvania’s ridge and valley province. Lanzone is the Assistant Field Ornithology Projects Coordinator for the Powdermill Avian Research Center. He, along…

  • Tree-Dwellers

    Warbler-watching is even more frustrating in late summer and early autumn than it is in spring. Not only do most warbler-watchers suffer from “warbler neck” as they look up at flitting birds foraging in the treetops, but they are faced with identifying what the late, great Roger Tory Peterson labeled “confusing fall warblers” in his…

  • 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…

  • Saving the Future

    “I’m convinced that something has to be done to keep cows out of the stream,” David Heverly told me. And so he had enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, which is better known by its acronym CREP. A federal program authorized and funded under the current Farm Bill, it is administered by the Farm…

  • Jeremiad

    In honor of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s dire predictions, I found the following in Peter Matthiessen’s End of the Earth, published in 2003: I seek to understand phenomena that might help our self-destroying species to appreciate the shimmering web of biodiversity in the Earth process, the common miracles, fleeting as ocean birds, which…

  • 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…

  • Grasslands of Central Pennsylvania

    On a day in late August, members of the Pennsylvania Native Plant Society visited what ecologist Roger Latham calls “wild-ungulate pastures” in Clearfield County’s Quehanna Wild Area. Latham, who has been working on a meadow and grass inventory of Pennsylvania, was searching for “meadows and grasslands that have persisted for a long while and for…

  • 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,…

  • The Piney Tract

    “Tsi-lick” went the Henslow’s sparrows. From every direction, they called as the cold wind swept over the prairie. Only it wasn’t a prairie. It was a rolling, brushy grassland in Clarion County called the Piney Tract. Also know as Mt. Zion, it is now officially State Game Lands 330. My husband Bruce and I were…

  • Crusader for Birds

    Two deer heads and three guns mounted on his study wall prove that he was once a hunter.  But a sign “I’d rather be birding” and the sheer number of bird paintings and paraphernalia in his modest country home signal his first and abiding love. Ralph K. Bell of Greene County has led a bird-obsessed…

  • Life at a Vernal Pond

    It was not the year to observe our vernal ponds. But how was I to know that? After two years of more precipitation than usual, all the depressions on top of Sapsucker Ridge beneath the oak and black cherry forest had filled with water. In late March, I counted four ponds. Three of them were…