I never thought I would see sandhill cranes less than 20 miles from my home in central Pennsylvania. Yet there I was last January, sitting in our car with my husband Bruce, watching five sandhill cranes through our scope as they foraged in a small wetland near State College. When the word went out on […]
Category: Wetlands
Vernal Pond Adventures
Once again I’m sitting beside our mountaintop vernal pond and wondering if this will be the year the wood frogs will make it out of the pond before the water disappears. A wood frog’s life span is about seven years, and for six years the pond has dried up before the wood frogs’ have fully […]
Grasses Wear Robes
We never get very far when we go on a Pennsylvania Native Plant Society field trip. But we always learn and see more than we bargained for. Take the grass field trip to Rothrock State Forest in central Pennsylvania that my son Dave and I joined last July. Let by Sarah Miller of the Penn […]
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 […]