Marcia Bonta

  • A Walk in the Park

    “Is there anything that can sting me?” our granddaughter Eva asked as she peered down at the lake bottom. She and I were swimming in Lake Jean at Ricketts Glen State Park. It was a hot day in early June, and this was ten-year-old Eva’s first experience of lake-swimming. Like her mother Luz she enjoys…

  • Saving the Future

    “I’m convinced that something has to be done to keep cows out of the stream,” David Heverly told me. And so he had enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, which is better known by its acronym CREP. A federal program authorized and funded under the current Farm Bill, it is administered by the Farm…

  • Grasslands of Central Pennsylvania

    On a day in late August, members of the Pennsylvania Native Plant Society visited what ecologist Roger Latham calls “wild-ungulate pastures” in Clearfield County’s Quehanna Wild Area. Latham, who has been working on a meadow and grass inventory of Pennsylvania, was searching for “meadows and grasslands that have persisted for a long while and for…

  • The Piney Tract

    “Tsi-lick” went the Henslow’s sparrows. From every direction, they called as the cold wind swept over the prairie. Only it wasn’t a prairie. It was a rolling, brushy grassland in Clarion County called the Piney Tract. Also know as Mt. Zion, it is now officially State Game Lands 330. My husband Bruce and I were…

  • Crusader for Birds

    Two deer heads and three guns mounted on his study wall prove that he was once a hunter.  But a sign “I’d rather be birding” and the sheer number of bird paintings and paraphernalia in his modest country home signal his first and abiding love. Ralph K. Bell of Greene County has led a bird-obsessed…

  • Life at a Vernal Pond

    It was not the year to observe our vernal ponds. But how was I to know that? After two years of more precipitation than usual, all the depressions on top of Sapsucker Ridge beneath the oak and black cherry forest had filled with water. In late March, I counted four ponds. Three of them were…

  • 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…

  • A Natural Heritage

    “I’m too old for this,” I think as I follow Jessica McPherson up and down the steep banks of Bob’s Creek on State Game Lands 26. I am also severely sleep-deprived and only sheer adrenalin keeps me going. But I am determined to keep up with McPherson, a woman four decades younger than me and…

  • Dragonflying

    “Dragonflying is good for jaded birdwatchers. It presents new challenges,” Cynthia Berger told me as we watched darting dragonflies at Whipple Dam State Park one sunny day in late July. Berger is the author of Dragonflies, an excellent new book designed for beginning dragonfly-watchers. These “glittering aerial acrobats,” Berger writes in her book, are similar…

  • Return to Enlow Fork

    I never expected to be conducting a choir of American toads at Enlow Fork. After all, this state game land (#302) in southwestern Washington and Greene counties is better known for its incredible diversity of plants and birds. Yet there I was, on the first day of May, surrounded by singing toads as I sat…

  • Manure Chasing

    Every winter we spend at least one cold day on a manure chase. We hope to find Arctic-tundra and grassland-breeding birds–specifically horned larks, Lapland longspurs, and snow buntings–that sometimes spend their winters in Pennsylvania farm valleys. These seed-eating birds feed on fresh manure because it contains seeds that have passed through the digestive systems of…

  • In Search of Old-Growth

    Every time our son Dave suggests a field trip in search of old-growth forests, I get nervous. I also grab my walking stick. That’s because these rumored old-growth remnants are always on steep rocky slopes that discouraged loggers back in the late 1800s. They also discourage me. Navigating up boulder-strewn mountainsides is not my strong…