Nature

Plummer’s Hollow is known to thousands of nature lovers through long-time resident Marcia Bonta’s nature books and her former “Naturalist’s Eye” column in Pennsylvania Game News. Most of those columns have been archived on her website.

We hope to be able to digitize many of our records from more than half a century of observations. For now, in addition to the vast trove of Marcia’s columns, we encourage all visitors to log their finds on eBird and iNaturalist. Eric Oliver coordinates an ongoing Plummers Hollow Bioblitz project on iNaturalist, which means that any observation made within the project boundaries will automatically be included. Here’s the species list as it stands.

The illustrated checklist of birds on eBird is curated by Mark, who has also authored a handy Guide to Birding Plummer’s Hollow and a list of Breeding Birds of Plummer’s Hollow, as well as her son Steve’s exhaustive list of beetles.

Mark records his adventures with Plummer’s Hollow avifauna on a free blog/newsletter, Bird Mountain. And his brother Dave keeps a daily microblog/newsletter of observations from his front porch: The Morning Porch.

Plummer’s Hollow has hosted several scientific studies over the years, including a couple that took advantage of a three-acre deer exclosure that we established in a section of older forest in 2001, and we would love to see more of that.

Our own efforts to document what’s up here have yielded a biological inventory—Bioplum—back in the 1990s, and currently include a nocturnal flight call (NFC) recorder in the garage, and just for good measure, a second recorder at Eric’s place using an AI-powered bioacoustics platform from BirdWeather. That data stream is publicly available as Station #3018 – Eric’s PUC. (Be aware that the AI is still improving, and any unusual species still need to be checked against the NFC data.)