Marcia Bonta

  • Ghost Bird

    A leucistic creature is white or pink all over, its eyes are usually blue, and it has little ability to produce color. Another source says a leucistic animal is not pure white, its pigmentation is diluted, and its plumage is lighter than usual but not pure white. David Bird, an ornithologist, recently defined leucism as…

  • 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…

  • 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. …

  • August Natives

    Joe Pye is back.  Not the Native American herbalist for whom the wildflower is named, but the gorgeous wildflower itself that towers above a sea of goldenrod in our First Field. Once we had dozens of joe-pye-weeds lifting their clusters of tiny, purple-colored blossoms above the lesser field flowers in August.  Then they disappeared.  We…

  • 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…

  • Black Raspberry Time

    Video link What a fruitful year this is.  Best of all is the resurrection of our black raspberry bushes around our homegrounds.  Their plenitude was what persuaded me to buy this place.  And then the deer moved in.  For decades they have eaten every raspberry cane that has dared to appear.  But now that our…

  • 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…

  • February Journal Highlights

    I’ve been updating my journal from the notes I take in my pocket notebook. Here are some excerpts from the first half of February. Bucks hanging out together, still wearing antlers February 3. Three degrees at dawn and absolutely clear. Winds cleaned the air and lowered the temperature throughout the moonlit night. At first, when…

  • Marooned

    Last January was a dream of a winter. By the middle of the month we had a foot of standing snow and I was out every bright, sunny day on my snowshoes. Birds and animals flocked to our feeders–32 American tree sparrows, 62 mourning doves, 40 dark-eyed juncos–along with a button buck, two cottontail rabbits,…

  • 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…

  • Alan’s Bench

    We have a new bench on our property–a memorial bench–built to honor one of our youngest hunters. Seventeen-year-old Alan Harshberger died in a pickup truck collision, through no fault of his, on Memorial Day weekend 2000. The bench was built by Tim Tyler, a hunter friend of ours who is a close friend of the…

  • 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…