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Courting Coons, Etc.
If I had another life to live, I would be a mammalogist. But instead of going to Africa to study the behavior of animals such as elephants or chimpanzees, I would specialize in some of eastern North America’s most common mammals. Countless books have been written about tigers and lions, elephants and chimpanzees, but few,…
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Great Backyard Bird Count
It’s mid-February and once again I’m counting birds for science. When I first heard about the Great Backyard Bird Count, I was enthusiastic. Instead of only one day, like the Christmas Bird Count and National Migratory Bird Day, I had four days. And it took place during the psychologically longest winter month, even though numerically…
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Watching Winter Predators
During winter, we are all in it together–the birds and animals that choose to tough out the season here, and my husband Bruce, our son Dave, and me. Wild creatures and humans alike must have enough food to stay alive and healthy and adequate shelter from cold and wind. For us humans it is relatively…
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Christmas Bird
He comes into our feeding grounds early on Christmas Day. Resplendent against the snow, he glows like a Christmas light. What is he doing here, among his drably suited brethren? Why isn’t he in the tropics with the other gaudily attired birds? Once the northern cardinal was a southern bird. John James Audubon knew it…
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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…
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A Seedy Month
What a wealth of wildlife food our forest produces in October. Probably our most important crop is acorns from our many mature oak trees. Early in the month, long before acorns fall off the trees, blue jays come from far and wide to pick them, their calls resounding through the forest as they shell and…
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Walking the Lines
“Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost once wrote. So do good surveys. After procrastinating for years, we bit the financial bullet and hired a surveyor to survey our square mile of mountain land. The surveyor was the same one who had surveyed a portion of our property years ago when we had bought some…
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Summer’s Fiddlers
He stalked through the grasses, ears cupped, head down. Then he squatted, still listening and looking. Steve Rannels was pursuing crickets and katydids behind the Middle Creek Management Area’s Visitors Center. My husband Bruce and I had been fascinated by the compact disc Rannels, Wil Hershberger and Joseph Dillon had recently released entitled “Songs of…
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Theodora Cope Gray – Nature’s Own Child
She died as she had wished, propped up in her bed so she could watch the birds at her feeder. At 94 years of age, Teddy Gray had lived a long and interesting life. She would say that her happiest days were those spent when she was married to Philip Gray whom she wed when…
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Return of the Whip-poor-wills
I remember 1976 and 1977 as whip-poor-will years. That was when a whip-poor-will adopted our home grounds as part of his territory, singing at dusk and dawn on our driveway and around both the guesthouse and main house. Several times our eldest son, Steve, and I sneaked down for a glimpse of him, but all…
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The Delaware Connection
To save a stream valley shared by two states seems an impossible dream, especially when the states are in the thickly populated eastern corridor. But that’s exactly what Pennsylvania and Delaware did. On the Pennsylvania side, in southeastern Chester County, the 1,253-acre White Clay Creek Preserve is the only preserve in the Pennsylvania state park…
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Passing the Torch
Four-year-old Eva came to us last spring for a five week visit after almost a year in Honduras. “She’s forgotten most of her English,” her father Mark warned. He had continued to speak English to her, but her mother Luz and grandmother Clara, who were also visiting, conversed with her in rapid-fire Spanish. How could…
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Marcia Bonta 