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Another Batty August
On a warm August evening, my husband Bruce and I sat in our living room, reading quietly. Suddenly, we were not alone. A bat, flying close to our heads, circled the room. Bruce called our son Dave up from the guesthouse to help shepherd the bat outside through the open front door, but it wouldn’t…
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Dragonflying
“Dragonflying is good for jaded birdwatchers. It presents new challenges,” Cynthia Berger told me as we watched darting dragonflies at Whipple Dam State Park one sunny day in late July. Berger is the author of Dragonflies, an excellent new book designed for beginning dragonfly-watchers. These “glittering aerial acrobats,” Berger writes in her book, are similar…
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Chasing Breeding Birds
“You know you’re getting old when you start repeating yourself,” I thought when I first heard about Pennsylvania’s Second Breeding Bird Atlas project. “Been there, done that,” I said and immediately signed up last spring and became the “owner” of the two blocks that include our property. The same, yet different, is probably an apt…
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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…
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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…
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Blithe Spirit
Spring came in on the March wind. The dawn chorus cranked into gear. Water streamed off the mountain and, in a few days, the snow and ice were gone. We were delighted to see bare ground again, but our granddaughter Eva was disappointed. Spring had long ago arrived at her Mississippi home. She had come…
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Marooned
Last January was a dream of a winter. By the middle of the month we had a foot of standing snow and I was out every bright, sunny day on my snowshoes. Birds and animals flocked to our feeders–32 American tree sparrows, 62 mourning doves, 40 dark-eyed juncos–along with a button buck, two cottontail rabbits,…
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Manure Chasing
Every winter we spend at least one cold day on a manure chase. We hope to find Arctic-tundra and grassland-breeding birds–specifically horned larks, Lapland longspurs, and snow buntings–that sometimes spend their winters in Pennsylvania farm valleys. These seed-eating birds feed on fresh manure because it contains seeds that have passed through the digestive systems of…
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In Search of Old-Growth
Every time our son Dave suggests a field trip in search of old-growth forests, I get nervous. I also grab my walking stick. That’s because these rumored old-growth remnants are always on steep rocky slopes that discouraged loggers back in the late 1800s. They also discourage me. Navigating up boulder-strewn mountainsides is not my strong…
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October’s Bright Blue Weather
Another October has come and gone and Dad was not here to see “October’s bright blue weather.” Even though he was born in January in the midst of a blizzard, I always thought of October as his month. Maybe that’s because not an October went by without him reciting Helen Hunt Jackson’s “October’s Bright Blue…
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Hurricane Isabel
A dire weather report put us on alert. Hurricane Isabel was headed in our direction after cutting a wide swath of destruction through North Carolina and Virginia. Memories of Hurricane Agnes, which struck here during our first year on the mountain, made me apprehensive. In June of 1972, days of rain preceding the hurricane had…
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Marcia Bonta 