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The Biodiversity of Lake Pleasant
On a bright, breezy day in early June we paddled a canoe around Lake Pleasant, one of eight glacial lakes in northwestern Pennsylvania. Despite its prosaic name, the 64-acre lake in eastern Erie County has more natural diversity along its shoreline, in its surrounding wetlands, and in the lake itself than any other lake in…
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Firefly Magic
Warm July nights are lit by a sea of blinking firefly lights. To my undiscriminating eye, the flashes seem to be random. But scientists studying fireflies are able to tell most species apart by the pattern, rhythm, and color of firefly flashes. That is also the way fireflies themselves identify their own species. Such knowledge…
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Down the Allegheny
A spectacular first day of June and my husband Bruce and I are heading down the river with the “Admiral of the Allegheny.” Dick Krear likes the honorary title and deserves it. As an unpaid River Keeper, he keeps a vigilant eye on human activities along the Allegheny from Franklin to Foxburg. He has also…
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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,…
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Saving Box Turtles
Imagine digging a trench for a box turtle enclosure in one hundred degree heat! That’s what an army of volunteers did back in July 1999 at the Buttermilk Hill Nature Sanctuary in northwestern Pennsylvania. “It took an hour to dig a yard,” Dr. William Belzer of Clarion University told my husband Bruce and me when…
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Cooper’s Hawk Redux
Back in mid-March 2002, our hopes were high. Our son Dave reported the loud “cak-cak-cak” dawn calling of a pair of Cooper’s hawks in the woods above the guesthouse. Day after day despite cold, misty rain, and even a snowstorm, the couple continued vocalizing. Near the end of the month they started refurbishing an old…
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Shrew Business
In the gray, gathering gloom of an imminent February snowstorm, I stopped to watch a northern short-tailed shrew foraging on the edge of our powerline right-of-way. On this day it was a breezy 22 degrees Fahrenheit and patches of bare earth alternated with patches of frozen snow. The shrew had scuttled past a mere five…
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Waxwing Winter
On a catch-your-breath cold morning in mid-January, I walked for a mile in silence. Only when I reached Coyote Bench did the forest come alive with music and color. A flock of cedar waxwings, whistling while they worked, harvested wild grapes from vines directly above my head. They look like perfect ladies and gentlemen in…
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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…
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Tinkerbells of the Bird World
Day after day in late May, an unfamiliar bird song that I heard as I walked through our Norway spruce grove haunted me. Then, on May 30, I finally identified the singers. Golden-crowned kinglets! And the female had nesting materials in her beak. Bold and cheerful as chickadees, golden-crowned kinglets are smaller, more elfin and…
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A Walking Meditation
Another National Migratory Bird Count day and we are blessed by a perfect May morning–cool, clear, and ringing with birdsong. This time, though, I resolve to take it easy, to move slowly and quietly, to make this day a walking meditation on the beauties of this most splendid of months. Besides, I am getting older…
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Fool’s Errand
Perhaps it was the memory of a rainy April day at the Brucker Great Blue Heron Sanctuary of Thiel College, or perhaps it was my admiration for these elegant waterbirds and the chance to see them once again going about their familial tasks. Whatever the reason, I had volunteered to participate in a statewide survey…
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Marcia Bonta 