Marcia Bonta

  • Scents and Sensibility

    Forty years ago. It’s early autumn and I’m sitting behind my boyfriend on his motorscooter. We bump along a dirt road winding through the mountains of central Pennsylvania. “Stop!” I yell suddenly. The scooter slides to a halt. “I smell New Jersey tea,” I say as I hop off and rush through the shrubby mountaintop…

  • A Seedy Month

    What a wealth of wildlife food our forest produces in October. Probably our most important crop is acorns from our many mature oak trees. Early in the month, long before acorns fall off the trees, blue jays come from far and wide to pick them, their calls resounding through the forest as they shell and…

  • Walking the Lines

    “Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost once wrote. So do good surveys. After procrastinating for years, we bit the financial bullet and hired a surveyor to survey our square mile of mountain land. The surveyor was the same one who had surveyed a portion of our property years ago when we had bought some…

  • Under the Spruce Grove

    Twenty-five years ago my husband Bruce and I planted 2000 Norway spruce seedlings at the top of First Field and 2000 red pine seedlings at the Far Field. The seedlings were courtesy of the Westvaco paper mill in Tyrone. The tree planter, which we hitched to our secondhand, Massey-Ferguson tractor, had been borrowed from the…

  • 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…

  • Saving Riparian Forests

    Our Plummer’s Hollow stream is a faint, unnamed blue line on Highbee’s stream map of Pennsylvania. Although it is only a mile and a half long and its streambed is less than ten feet wide, it greatly influences the streamside or riparian forest through which it flows. The riparian forest, in turn, is essential to…

  • Flowering Trees of Spring

    Last spring was wonderful for those of us who admire the blossoms of deciduous forest trees. The heat wave at the end of March brought out many flowering trees two weeks earlier than usual. Continual cold throughout April and early May kept them in their blossoming stage for weeks instead of days which gave me…