Marcia Bonta

  • 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…

  • Turtle Woods Wildflower Sanctuary, Part 2

    Four years have passed since we built our three-acre deer exclosure, and already the changes are noticeable. Tree seedlings have sprouted and grown, and new wildflower species have appeared. Slowly the deer browse line has softened and filled in. We chose to put the exclosure in a mature patch of deciduous forest so the changes…

  • An Irish Spring

    “I wake and hear it raining.” So begins Mark Van Doren’s wonderful poem “Morning Worship” and so began many of my mornings last spring. Van Doren goes on to list the wonders of the natural world he would miss were he dead, praising all the “sweet beings” that he knows will outlive him–mountains, huge trees,…

  • In a Milkweed Patch

    A hot day in mid-July and I am standing transfixed at the edge of a common milkweed patch, watching a bewildering number of colorful butterflies nectaring on the cluster of drooping, dusty-rose flowers. There are great-spangled fritillaries and tiger swallowtails, silver-spotted skippers and clouded sulphurs, gray hairstreaks and common sootywings, an American painted lady and…

  • Turtle Woods Wildflower Sanctuary

    I never should have taken my husband Bruce to see Latham’s Acre. Located at State Game Lands 30 on Dividing Ridge in southeastern McKean County, it was like stepping into a lost world, one that had been fenced to keep out deer back in 1949 by Roger Latham and Stan Forbes of the Pennsylvania Game…

  • 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…

  • Continental Habitat Islands

    Bob Gruver held the small snake by the back of its head as we gathered around to look. The owner of the shale barren we were exploring, John Cantrell, was aghast. “That’s a copperhead,” he said. “No, no,” Gruver answered. “Look at the turned-up snout. This is a young hognose snake.” The rest of us…

  • 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,…