Marcia Bonta

  • Sunday, Sweet Sunday

    Sunday is my favorite day of the week.  That’s because traffic is light on Interstate 99 at the base of our mountain on the Logan Valley side and the industrial-sized limestone quarry on the Sinking Valley side is closed for the day.  Other businesses are also quiet, and I revel in the peace of “Sunday,…

  • 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…

  • Wily Hole Digger

    Forget Groundhog Day! It’s a scam. Around here most woodchucks don’t appear until March, although we have recorded them as early as February 25. But March is the official wakeup month for most Pennsylvania woodchucks and when they emerge they are interested in sex, not in predicting the weather. First the males appear and wander…