Marcia Bonta

  • Adaptation

    Adaptation

    July, like January, is the most extreme month of its season, and during both months I must adapt to challenging weather if I want to walk our trails and observe wildlife. In January, when the wind is howling and it’s ten degrees Fahrenheit, I wait until mid-morning to venture outside swathed in several layers of…

  • Food for Wildlife

    After three lean years, our oak trees finally produced a bumper crop of acorns last September. Forewarned by hordes of blue jays screaming from the treetops as they plucked ripe acorns from the oaks, I had to be careful on our steep trails not to slide on the fallen nuts that were more hazardous than…

  • Winter Porkies

    While I may puzzle over some tracks, there is no mistaking those of porcupines. They plow through the snow on their naked, flat, pigeon-toed feet like miniature bulldozers, and when the tracks freeze, deer, opossums and foxes use them as winter highways.

  • 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…

  • The Longest Autumn

    Every autumn the first hard frost comes later. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, when we were engaged in intensive gardening, we could expect a hard frost in the first week of October. Gradually, as the years passed, the hard frost date arrived in the second week. Then, in this century, it moved into…

  • Red Maples: A Celebration of Red

    Sometime in mid-March, after the eastern phoebes have returned, our red maple tree buds turn a deeper scarlet, adding welcome color to our forest. Shortly thereafter I catch the faint scent of their opening red and orange flowers. The clusters of dangling, bell-shaped red flowers with red forked tongues (stigmas) are female while the orange…

  • Talus Slope Life

    Late in March, I ease my way down to the talus slope in an attempt to escape female ticks eager for blood to nourish their eggs. I’ve never been surefooted, so, clutching my walking stick, I only go far enough out on the rocks to escape the bloodsuckers. Luckily, the March wind is blowing, which…

  • The Beautiful Beech

    Ghostly leaves of American beech trees sway in February storms like tiny spirits alive in a frozen world.  But only small and medium-sized beech trees hold on to their leaves throughout the winter. In the fall, I watch the toothed, leathery, single beech leaves turn from green to gold.  Then the gold leaks from them…

  • October snow

    “Nanna, it’s snowing!” My first thought was, no, it can’t be.  It’s only the fifteenth of October.  We’ve never had snow this early. Why, last year our first frost was October 19. Surely it won’t last, this spring onion snow in October. Big, fat flakes fell and Elanor, our four-year-old granddaughter, and her Uncle Dave…

  • Redbud Valley

    We live just above the redbud line that stretches across the middle of Pennsylvania.  But we only need to descend our mountain road and head south a few miles into the rich limestone valleys to see field edges and hillsides of redbud covered with clusters of pea-shaped lavender blossoms that have sprouted along their branches…

  • The Tree of Great Peace

    The Iroquois called it the “Tree of Great Peace.” Its cluster of five needles to a bundle represented the five nations of the Iroquois and its spreading roots, reaching east, north, west, and south were the roots of peace that extended to all peoples. We call this tree, more prosaically, eastern white pine — Pinus…

  • A Fruitful Year

    Some years are more fruitful than others.  Last year was one of those years.  From mid-June until mid-August I never set out for my morning walk without slipping a pint jar into my pocket.  I wanted to be prepared to pick first the low bush blueberries, then the huckleberries on the powerline right-of-way, and later,…