Marcia Bonta

  • Losses and Gains

    Losses and Gains

    Last August, near the end of the month, it was finally clear, cool, and free of the bothersome mosquitoes and gnats that make hiking in the hot, humid summer unpleasant. Still, I had persevered most days when it wasn’t storming. On this August day, I chose to walk along Ten Springs Trail. That trail is…

  • Going, Going, Gone

    Going, Going, Gone

    August is mostly hot and humid, but every year there are more and more mosquitoes. Many people blamed the excessive rain in the spring and summer of 2018 for the massive numbers of mosquitoes and black flies. It was almost as if we were living in the North Woods. Our vernal ponds on top of…

  • April Journal Highlights (1)

    Heaven on Earth April 1. Forty degrees at dawn and overcast. But a flash of sunlight encouraged me to go outside before the expected rain. I was fully dressed, boots laced, umbrella hanging on my belt, when the heavens opened. April Fool, I thought, and prepared to spend the day inside, catching up on my…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…