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Pennsylvania Hiking Week
By the time my husband Bruce and I learned that our 13-year-old granddaughter Eva was going to spend the summer with us, most of the state park cabins were booked up. But we were able to snag a few days at Hills Creek State Park between Mansfield and Wellsboro in north central Tioga County. We…
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Different Worlds
What a difference a few miles can make. From our home on the westernmost ridge of the Ridge and Valley Province to the Allegheny Front is only a couple miles as the crow flies, yet, as I teetered across a log and cable bridge over Bell Gap Run on State Game Lands 108, I felt…
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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…
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Nature’s Garbage Collectors
Like residents of Hinckley, Ohio, who always welcome the first turkey vultures back on March 15, I too await the return of them in March and regard them as one of the first signs of spring. Usually the day they appear here is windy, and they rock back and forth above First Field, their wings…
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Talking with Chris Bolgiano about nature writing and the environment
Check out the two-part conversation between Marcia and her friend Chris Bolgiano, a naturalist-writer from the mountains of western Virginia, at the Woodrat Podcast: Part 1, Tales from the Nature-Writing Trenches, and Part 2, Greening the Appalachians.
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The Green House
To stay or to go. That was the dilemma we faced. We weren’t getting any younger, and my husband Bruce could no longer maintain our mile-and-a-half, steep mountain road, ten miles of trails, barn, shed, 1865 guesthouse, 1873 main house, and garage by himself. Bruce also needed help keeping our tractor and secondhand bulldozer running. …
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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…
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Snowbirds
It was a fine early December day — 18 degrees with partial sunshine and a howling wind. A new half-inch of snow covered the ground. I counted the birds at my feeders because it was a Project FeederWatch day. For over 20 years, two days a week from November until early April, I’ve been counting…
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In Search of Silence
Ever since I read about Gordon Hempton’s One Square Inch of Silence project, I’ve been more keenly aware of our noisy world. Hempton, a sound ecologist, has been recording natural sounds for decades. Nicknamed Sound Tracker for his recordings, he laments that every decade our world becomes noisier. While city dwellers are acutely conscious of…
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Charismatic Invertebrates
“Dear Daddy-Long-Legs, Isn’t it funny? I started to write to you yesterday afternoon, but as far as I got was the heading, ‘Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,’ and then I remembered I’d promised to pick some blackberries for supper, so I went off and left the sheet lying on the table, and when I came back, what do…
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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,…
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August Natives
Joe Pye is back. Not the Native American herbalist for whom the wildflower is named, but the gorgeous wildflower itself that towers above a sea of goldenrod in our First Field. Once we had dozens of joe-pye-weeds lifting their clusters of tiny, purple-colored blossoms above the lesser field flowers in August. Then they disappeared. We…
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Marcia Bonta 