Appalachian Spring

Book excerpt: Marcia Bonta is a naturalist-writer who has lived on a 500-acre mountain-top farm in central Pennsylvania for twenty years. Appalachian Spring is her personal account of that glorious spectacle - the coming of the spring to the woods and fields of Appalachia.The book begins with spring preliminaries in January and February when gray squirrels mate and the great horned owls conduct their courtship rites. Then, with the onset of true spring, the intricacies of the season unravel day by day in journal entries that combine Bonta's own meticulous observations with the research reported by botanists, entomologists, and other natural scientists.She recounts her hours spent watching an active red fox den or observing the drumming of a male ruffed grouse - all without the benefit of a blind. She discovers new-born fawns on the trail and hen turkeys with their poults in the field. A black bear peers into her sitting room window; deer play tag in her front yard.Birdwatching is an integral part of her spring ritual; she records both the return of nesting species and the passing through of migrants. She spends a blustery St. Patrick's Day following a flock of American pipits foraging in her field, discovers and watches an ovenbird nest beside her trail, and counts twenty-three species of wood warblers during one spectacular day in mid-May.Every aspect of the natural world catches her eye, from tthe life cycle of a tent caterpillar to the sex life of a jack-in-the-pulpit. But while she considers her book to ber her own love sone about the place and season on earth she loves most, she also mourns the continual exploitation of the natural earth by humanity for its own often superficial uses. She hopes, by recounting the wonders of the natural world, to convert others to what she calls the "third stage" in humanity's relationship with nature, that of empathy with all of nature for its own sake. "To know the earth better, to grasp a little of its workings, to look on it with awe and wonder as well as with respect, is to want to save it from destruction."