Marcia Bonta

Marcia Myers Bonta (née Myers; born July 11, 1940) is an American nature writer, environmentalist, columnist, and historian of women naturalists. She and her husband Bruce D. Bonta (1941–2021) established the Plummer's Hollow Private Nature Preserve and were active in the Pennsylvania Forest Stewardship Program.

Quotes

• Bachman's two specialties were mammals and birds, but during a trip he took north with Maria and his sister Eva in 1823, he also collected plants. That may have been when Maria first discovered that she preferred botany too, since she preserved the specimens he "pulled up." Bachman also instilled in Maria his own habit of referring to plants by their scientific names.
  • Women in the Field: America's Pioneering Women Naturalists. Texas A & M University Press. 1991. p. 10.  (299 pages)

• march 3. Brown-headed cowbirds have had a bad press because of their propensity to lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species who not only do not recognized the eggs or resulting hatchlings as strangers, but will feed the pushy youngsters to the detriment of their own blood relations. The sound of their liquid song in a still-silent woods is, nevertheless, a welcome sign of spring. And to watch several males lined up beside a female, giving what bird behaviorists Donald and Lilian Stokes call their "topple-over" display in an effort to win the female for their own, is one my earliest spring entertainments. Today, in the black walnut tree in my back yard, they performed the ceremony for the first time this spring.
  • Appalachian Spring. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2010. p. 22. ISBN 9780822971467.  (208 pages; 1st edition 1991)

• Fishers are most famous for their porcupine-killing prowess. Because they are quick on their feet, they attack porcupines head on, circling and lunging at the creatures and biting their faces until they exhaust and hurt them. Then they flip them on their backs and eat their quill-less throats and bellies.
  • Appalachian Summer. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011. p. 10. ISBN 9780822972006.  (212 pages; 1st edition 1999)

• Young raccoons usually spend the winter in a communal nest with their mother and sometimes other raccoons, as many as twenty-three, in a state of semihibernation, once they have built up a layer of fat to sustain themselves during winter food shortages. Those dens are most often in hollow trees but can also be under tree roots, in rocky crevices, or in remodeled woodchuck, opossum, fox or skunk dens.
  • Appalachian Winter. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2011. p. 9. ISBN 9780822972709.  (248 pages; 1st edition 2005)

Quotes about Marcia Bonta

• The lives and thoughts of American women field naturalists as researched and presented by Marcia Myers Bonta make a raadable and thought-provoking book. The book includes 18th-century "pioneers," early "naturalists" such as Mary Treat, an experimenter with carnivorous plants and a correspondent of Darwin's, and botanists, entomologists, ornithologists, and ecologists up to Rachel Carson in the 20th century.
  • Nancy G. Slack, (23 August 1991) "Scientific Adventuresses: Women in the Field. America's Pioneering Women Naturalists by Marcia Myers Bonta" 253 (5022): 917–918. DOI:10.1126/science.253.5022.917.

External links

• Marcia Bonta. Pennsylvania Center for the Book.
• Marcia Bonta, naturalist writer. marciabonta.com.
• Bonta, Marcia Myers. encyclopedia.com.