Marcia Bonta

  • Mad Marmots

    “Danger–Mad Marmot” warned the sign on the laboratory door. Inside stuffed woodchucks and other woodchuck memorabilia cover Stam Zervanos’s desk and study area. Zervanos, a biology professor at Penn State University’s Berks-Lehigh Valley College near Reading, has been studying woodchucks, the least social of the marmot genus, for eight years. As a physiological ecologist, he…

  • Another Batty August

    On a warm August evening, my husband Bruce and I sat in our living room, reading quietly. Suddenly, we were not alone. A bat, flying close to our heads, circled the room. Bruce called our son Dave up from the guesthouse to help shepherd the bat outside through the open front door, but it wouldn’t…

  • Turtle Woods Wildflower Sanctuary, Part 2

    Four years have passed since we built our three-acre deer exclosure, and already the changes are noticeable. Tree seedlings have sprouted and grown, and new wildflower species have appeared. Slowly the deer browse line has softened and filled in. We chose to put the exclosure in a mature patch of deciduous forest so the changes…

  • 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,…

  • Little Loggers

    Last winter I spent more time watching meadow voles beneath our feeders than I did birds. The heavy snowfall in early December provided perfect cover for them and when most of it melted later in the month, the voles’ runways were easy to see. Several voles had nests near our feeders and often their dark…

  • Shrew Business

    In the gray, gathering gloom of an imminent February snowstorm, I stopped to watch a northern short-tailed shrew foraging on the edge of our powerline right-of-way. On this day it was a breezy 22 degrees Fahrenheit and patches of bare earth alternated with patches of frozen snow. The shrew had scuttled past a mere five…

  • Nature’s Ultimate Bankers

    It’s late January as I crunch over frosty, fallen leaves on my way to Coyote Bench. Almost immediately I hear the high-pitched whine of a female gray squirrel in a mating chase. Four male squirrels are after her, but one male fends off the others. Once the female turns and faces him at the end…

  • Coyote Birthday

    Two summers ago I reached one of those milestone birthdays that I didn’t want to think about. “Don’t bother celebrating my birthday,” I told my family. “But Mom,” our son Dave protested, “I’m going to give you coyotes for your birthday.” I was skeptical that he could do so even though our adventure with coyotes…

  • Courting Coons, Etc.

    If I had another life to live, I would be a mammalogist. But instead of going to Africa to study the behavior of animals such as elephants or chimpanzees, I would specialize in some of eastern North America’s most common mammals. Countless books have been written about tigers and lions, elephants and chimpanzees, but few,…

  • Watching Winter Predators

    During winter, we are all in it together–the birds and animals that choose to tough out the season here, and my husband Bruce, our son Dave, and me. Wild creatures and humans alike must have enough food to stay alive and healthy and adequate shelter from cold and wind. For us humans it is relatively…

  • Lion Country?

    It seems as if everywhere I go, I hear stories about mountain lions. Not just in Pennsylvania, but Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, and West Virginia. New England has also produced a rash of plausible sightings. What is happening? Has the eastern mountain lion or cougar (Puma concolor couguar), as biologists prefer to call it, returned…

  • Visitors from the River

    Occasionally we are reminded that the Little Juniata River flows past the northeast end of our mountain when unexpected visitors from the river appear here. Imagine, for instance, my husband Bruce’s surprise when driving down our narrow, gravel, wooded, hollow road one spring morning and encountering a large snapping turtle plodding up toward him. This…