Marcia Bonta

  • Squirrel Wars

    Squirrel Wars

    Last autumn, our granddaughter Eva, who was staying with us for several months, started complaining about the noise in the attic above her bedroom. At first, I dismissed it as the usual small animal noises on the roof or even in the attic. My bedroom was next to hers and I wasn’t hearing anything out…

  • The Value of Aging Trees

    On a hot July day, I sit beneath a large red oak, nestled into a deep buttress, one of several that flare out from this 200-year-old tree. The ground beneath the tree is littered with old acorn remnants as are the bases of the other elders in this stand of deciduous trees. Protected as a…

  • April Journal Highlights (2)

    Close encounters of the avian kind April 18. The sun warmed the Far Field, and as I walked Pennyroyal Trail, a towhee sang, a flicker called, and a ruby-crowned kinglet sang. I stopped to “pish,” hoping to entice the kinglet into view, and I did. He flew on to a tree branch, erected his ruby-crown,…

  • 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…

  • Winter Survival Champions

    “It’s amazing. I can’t believe there’s anything here,” exclaimed Dr. Joseph Merritt. Resident Director of Powdermill Nature Reserve, the biological field station of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History and author of Guide to the Mammals of Pennsylvania, Merritt is a specialist in small mammals. To learn more about the lives of such creatures as…