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The Black Cat Returns
Most days I spend at least a couple hours walking in our woods. Unlike the nature shows on television, weeks can pass before I encounter, for instance, a mother bear and her cubs, a waddling porcupine, an unusual bird or plant, a bounding short-tailed weasel, a newborn fawn, or some other sighting that makes my…
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Important Bird Area #32
We stood on our front porch counting birds last Fourth of July. In the dawn’s early light, my son Dave timed me while I named the birds I heard or saw in three minutes–wood thrush, American goldfinch, indigo bunting, American crow, common yellowthroat, Carolina wren, yellow-billed cuckoo, chipping sparrow, blue-gray gnatcatcher, field sparrow, white-breasted nuthatch,…
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Green Immigrants of June
In June our home is afloat in a sea of orchid or so it seems because dame’s rocket blankets the back slope. Locals call it phlox, but wild phlox is a native wildflower that has five-petaled flowers and dame’s rocket is a Eurasian immigrant with four-petaled flowers that forms a showy cluster along its two-to-three…
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Crusader for Birds
Two deer heads and three guns mounted on his study wall prove that he was once a hunter. But a sign “I’d rather be birding” and the sheer number of bird paintings and paraphernalia in his modest country home signal his first and abiding love. Ralph K. Bell of Greene County has led a bird-obsessed…
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Life at a Vernal Pond
It was not the year to observe our vernal ponds. But how was I to know that? After two years of more precipitation than usual, all the depressions on top of Sapsucker Ridge beneath the oak and black cherry forest had filled with water. In late March, I counted four ponds. Three of them were…
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Mad Marmots
“Danger–Mad Marmot” warned the sign on the laboratory door. Inside stuffed woodchucks and other woodchuck memorabilia cover Stam Zervanos’s desk and study area. Zervanos, a biology professor at Penn State University’s Berks-Lehigh Valley College near Reading, has been studying woodchucks, the least social of the marmot genus, for eight years. As a physiological ecologist, he…
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Mountain of Ice
We awoke, on the sixth of last January, to a mountain of ice. All night long trees and branches crashed down as our thermometer probe, encased in ice, registered a steady 32.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That morning an icy mist of rain continued falling, and so did trees and branches. I sat at our bow window…
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Eternal Evergreens
Now that the deciduous trees have shed their leaves, the woods seem bare and dreary. Maybe that is why I spend much of the winter down in the hollow among the hemlocks or up in the Norway spruce grove. Both offer shelter and comfort on the coldest, bleakest winter days. The birds and animals, too,…
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A Natural Heritage
“I’m too old for this,” I think as I follow Jessica McPherson up and down the steep banks of Bob’s Creek on State Game Lands 26. I am also severely sleep-deprived and only sheer adrenalin keeps me going. But I am determined to keep up with McPherson, a woman four decades younger than me and…
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Marcia Bonta 