Pennsylvania Game News - December 2021 - 62

the subject was the Carolina wren, " A
Bird for All Seasons. "
The previous May, Bruce had come
into our house and told me that he had
just found a Carolina wren nest containing
six eggs. It was in the upper story of
our Pennsylvania bank barn, in a box
of our son Steve's cast-off clothing that
he had topped with his stuffed Opus the
Penguin from his favorite Bloom County
comic strip. The penguin was lying on its
side and the domed wren nest had been
constructed in the semi-circular space
formed by the base of the penguin's outsized
bill and its potbelly.
After the eggs hatched, Bruce made
a blind for me by turning a large packing
box upside down, then cutting a door
in one side and a window in the other.
Inside, he put an old kitchen chair where
I sat and spent many happy hours watching
the nestlings and their parents go
about their birdy business.
That was just one way in which
Bruce helped me in my growing career
as a nature writer. He edited my
first book about our first five years
here, and we worked together on two
books about 160 unique Pennsylvania
natural places. He did the driving,
photographing, and direction writing,
while I provided the texts.
As a Penn State University reference
librarian, Bruce also steered
me to the many scientific resources
I needed both for my nature-writing
and my two history books on American
women field naturalists. And, of
course, it was his work on our road
and grounds that kept us safely here
even through winters that required
him to use our secondhand bulldozer
and/or plow to keep our north-facing,
mile-and-half hollow road open.
We raised most of our food our first
62
15 years here and heated our downstairs
with wood from our forest. We kept
chickens and Muscovy ducks for food.
I cooked and froze vegetables from the
huge garden Bruce planted and we both
weeded. We were a team in this life we
had chosen for ourselves and our three
sons.
Years ago, Jackie Rollfinke, a friend
of mine from Bucknell University,
where Bruce and I met, sent us a book
titled Bruce and Marcia, Woodsmen
by William P. Alexander and Maribelle
Cormack. Published in 1939, a year
before I was born and two years before
Bruce was, it told the story of best
friends 12-year-old Bruce and 11-yearold
Marcia. They lived in a small town
near Buffalo, N.Y., and every Saturday
they accompanied a retired science professor
into the nearby woods and fields
to learn about the plants and creatures
that lived there.
The book was lavishly illustrated with
line drawings not only of the children
and the professor, but of the many discoveries
they made during their explorations.
In the foreword to the book, a
friend of the authors' wrote that " the purpose
of the stories is to interest children
in their own home locality, so that they
will form clubs of naturalists to learn of
the beautiful and interesting wildlife all
about them. "
Although I didn't know of such a
book when I was a child living near a
chain of three lakes tucked into a southern
New Jersey forest, I did organize nature
hikes along the forest trails for my
three younger siblings and their neighborhood
friends. And Bruce lived with
his family on a country property with a
pond where he fished and swam in central
New Jersey.
Pennsylvania Game News - December 2021

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