Marcia Bonta

  • Beetlemania

    “Congratulations, Mom!” the email from my oldest son, Steve, said. “You finally have an organism named after you. Semiotus is a genus of very large, tropical click beetles [and] S. marciae is a species from Ecuador. Your beetle is large (about one inch) and very colorful, like all Semiotus. You’ll probably end up in quite…

  • Hiking the Bells Gap Rail Trail

    On the last day of October, twenty friends and members of the Juniata Valley Audubon Society hiked down the Allegheny Front beginning in State Gamelands 158, following the remains of the Bells Gap Narrow-Gauge Railroad. Back in 1872, it was built from the railroad station in the Logan Valley town of Bellwood to Lloydsville, nine…

  • Hiking the Ghost Town Trail

    No trace of December’s snow remained. “It might as well be spring,” I thought as I hummed the lines of an old song. But it wasn’t spring.  It was January 7 and a balmy 60 degrees.  Seduced by the perfect day, my husband Bruce and I set out to hike portions of the Ghost Town…

  • In Search of Nature

    “It’s too darned hot,” I said on our 45th wedding anniversary. The temperature was heading into the high, humid nineties so we shelved our plan to take a hike. Instead, we followed Plan B and on a late August morning, my husband Bruce and I drove to the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art in…

  • Welcome Spring

    “Naturalist’s Eye” column for Pennsylvania Game News, March, 2007 I’ve closed our gate behind me after crossing the Little Juniata River and the main railroad line from New York to Chicago. Almost immediately I step into a different, older world this breezy, blue-skied day in late March. For weeks spring has played with us, blowing…

  • What’s in a Name?

    After a brief walk on a cold and dreary January day, I curled up in my study and tried to update Bioplum, a natural inventory of our property. Last spring I had finally identified a nondescript-looking wildflower spreading along our roadbank as Pennsylvania bittercress (Cardamine pensylvanica), and I wanted to add it to our list…

  • Snowshoeing for Birds

    For twenty-five years I have gone out on foot to count both bird species and numbers for the annual Christmas Bird Count, popularly known as the CBC. But last December was a first for me. I did the CBC on snowshoes! I was thrilled by the deep snow and cold weather that had started with…

  • The Delaware Connection

    To save a stream valley shared by two states seems an impossible dream, especially when the states are in the thickly populated eastern corridor. But that’s exactly what Pennsylvania and Delaware did. On the Pennsylvania side, in southeastern Chester County, the 1,253-acre White Clay Creek Preserve is the only preserve in the Pennsylvania state park…

  • Visiting Old Growth

    Sometimes you have to work to see an old growth forest. That’s what my husband Bruce, our son Dave, and I decided as we labored up the steep, rocky, north side of Paddy Mountain one summer day. We were following the unmarked Joyce Kilmer Trail through the Joyce Kilmer Natural Area in Bald Eagle State…

  • Latham’s Acre

    Land Manager John Dzemyan is a man with a mission. He wants every hunter in Pennsylvania to see his 150 deer exclosures on state gamelands in McKean and Elk counties. Only then will they understand the terrific damage an overabundant deer herd does to the forest, a forest that sustains not only deer but bear,…