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Winter Visitor
Near the end of January I swept our back porch clean of an inch of snow before spreading bird seed. Immediately a sparrow throng of dark-eyed juncos, white-throated, song, and American tree sparrows mobbed the porch. But one sparrow looked different from the rest and fed off by itself. Still, with its rusty-red cap it
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The Art and Science of Feeding Birds
I first began feeding winter birds in November 1968 when we lived in rural central Maine for five years. At the beginning of November, I hung a feeder filled with sunflower and mixed seeds from the yard American elm tree, but it wasn’t until a wet, snowy November 10 that the first birds appeared. I
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The Life of a Sapsucker
Last November26, I walked into our sunroom. Almost immediately I spotted a male yellow-bellied sapsucker eating the fruit of one of two hackberry trees we had planted more than a decade ago. Also called “sugarberry,” it is known to be a favorite winter food for a variety of songbirds, most notably American robins and yellow-bellied
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A Madness in the Sky
Sometime in late October or early November I hear and then see enormous blackbird flocks as they briefly land in our forest calling and feeding. Usually they consist of incredibly noisy European starlings and common grackles on their way South for the winter. I enjoy watching and listening to them as they engage in what
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Tom’s Finch
On the last day of September, our son Mark found the first migrating white-crowned and white-throated sparrows behind the barn and guesthouse. He also pointed out a Lincoln’s sparrow he had discovered at the edge of the hedgerow bordering First Field. I’m not an expert on the “little brown jobs,” as birders refer to the
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Cats and Wildlife
My mother-in-law was a cat lady. Born and raised on a farm in northeastern Pennsylvania in the early 20th century, she, like most rural residents, then and now, knew the value of “barn cats”—free-ranging cats fed by farmers in exchange for the cats dispatching the rats and mice attracted to food they grew and stored.
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Central Appalachian Fishers
It was near the beginning of the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s reintroduction of fishers to the commonwealth. This second largest member of the weasel family had last been documented in Pennsylvania when it was trapped in 1921 at Holtwood, in Lancaster County. Denise Mitcheltree, then a graduate student at Penn State back in May of 1995,
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Right-of-Way Science
It’s a hot, dry day in late June when my 12-year-old granddaughter Elanor and I, along with 25 other folks, visit the First Energy/Penelec Right-of-Way on SGL#33. Our friend, Dr. Carolyn Mahan, Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona, has organized one of four scheduled bee-collection dates for this well-studied right-of-way. Research
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Audubon’s Pewee
It’s a day in late May and already the nests of our eastern phoebes are bursting with nestlings preparing to fledge. Over the 47 years we have lived on our mountain, our buildings have hosted many eastern phoebe nests. Some buildings, such as the guesthouse portico and the old outhouse, contained nests for several decades,
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Chasing Waterfowl
Early April is the time to see migrating waterfowl on every pond, lake, and river in our state, and last spring was no exception. On a warm, breezy, April day, led by our birder son, Mark, my husband Bruce and I took an all-day tour in search of ducks, geese, and other assorted waterfowl. Mark
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Black Squirrels
“Mom, there’s a black squirrel in the flat area.” It was 5:30 p.m. on a balmy day in early March and my son Dave and I were fixing dinner in the kitchen. I rushed to the window, grabbed my binoculars, and called my husband Bruce to come and see the unusual eastern gray squirrel. In
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Weird Winter
The weird winter of 2017 had thaws longer and warmer than freezes. Our white nights of bright moonlight shining on snow were scarce. It was an old person’s winter lacking the usual ice and snow that often makes for hazardous walking. Since I am an old person, I should have been grateful but I wasn’t
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Marcia Bonta 