Marcia Bonta

  • October’s Bright Blue Weather

    Another October has come and gone and Dad was not here to see “October’s bright blue weather.” Even though he was born in January in the midst of a blizzard, I always thought of October as his month. Maybe that’s because not an October went by without him reciting Helen Hunt Jackson’s “October’s Bright Blue…

  • Hurricane Isabel

    A dire weather report put us on alert.  Hurricane Isabel was headed in our direction after cutting a wide swath of destruction through North Carolina and Virginia. Memories of Hurricane Agnes, which struck here during our first year on the mountain, made me apprehensive.  In June of 1972, days of rain preceding the hurricane had…

  • Living in the Appalachian Forest

    If you have aliens on your property, March is the month to take inventory. That’s because many of the most damaging ones leaf out way ahead of native plants. Scientists call the worst of these plants “invasives.” And invade they do, especially over on the former property of our logger-neighbor. Back in 1991, before we…

  • Turtle Woods Wildflower Sanctuary

    I never should have taken my husband Bruce to see Latham’s Acre. Located at State Game Lands 30 on Dividing Ridge in southeastern McKean County, it was like stepping into a lost world, one that had been fenced to keep out deer back in 1949 by Roger Latham and Stan Forbes of the Pennsylvania Game…

  • Walking the Lines

    “Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost once wrote. So do good surveys. After procrastinating for years, we bit the financial bullet and hired a surveyor to survey our square mile of mountain land. The surveyor was the same one who had surveyed a portion of our property years ago when we had bought some…

  • Visiting Old Growth

    Sometimes you have to work to see an old growth forest. That’s what my husband Bruce, our son Dave, and I decided as we labored up the steep, rocky, north side of Paddy Mountain one summer day. We were following the unmarked Joyce Kilmer Trail through the Joyce Kilmer Natural Area in Bald Eagle State…

  • Minstrel of the Woods

    I don’t have to leave this planet to hear the music of the spheres. Surely, listening to wood thrushes singing is as ethereal an experience as any mortal can hope for on earth. Many evenings, when I step outside, wood thrush song envelops me and it seems as if all the world’s wood thrushes are…

  • Latham’s Acre

    Land Manager John Dzemyan is a man with a mission. He wants every hunter in Pennsylvania to see his 150 deer exclosures on state gamelands in McKean and Elk counties. Only then will they understand the terrific damage an overabundant deer herd does to the forest, a forest that sustains not only deer but bear,…

  • Saving Riparian Forests

    Our Plummer’s Hollow stream is a faint, unnamed blue line on Highbee’s stream map of Pennsylvania. Although it is only a mile and a half long and its streambed is less than ten feet wide, it greatly influences the streamside or riparian forest through which it flows. The riparian forest, in turn, is essential to…