This top honor recognizes an outstanding contribution to the protection and/or enhancement of the Pennsylvania park and forest system. 

It is the lucky among us indeed who find our career in total alignment with our passions. Marcus Schneck was certainly among those lucky ones, melding his love for all of Penn’s Woods with a 27-year career with Harrisburg’s Patriot News and PennLive covering outdoor pursuits of all kinds. His unexpected death at the age of 66 last December silenced a voice that introduced many a Pennsylvanian to the natural world.

Marcus was a hunter and fisherman certainly – and was revered by those communities for the respectful coverage he provided them – but his “outdoor writing” went far beyond those interests to include hiking, gardening, birding, and conservation of the places and habitats that made those interests possible. As he wrote himself in 2021 when he launched an online newsletter for PennLive, “There are few outdoor pursuits that the Keystone State fails to offer, or that I’ve tried at least a few times, and this weekly newsletter will explore them all.”

Through his dozens of books on the outdoors, Marcus educated us on gardening (for food and wildlife), bird-watching, Pennsylvania’s country towns and back roads, and exotic species. He wrote on subjects as diverse as Bigfoot, the search for a predator of the spotted lanternfly, meteors in the night sky, and the future of bumblebees.

His co-workers applauded his generosity and humor and his readers thanked him for practical advice (“I now have a yard full of wildlife – [it was] a grass field!”); his fellow outdoor writers appreciated his breadth of knowledge and engaging way with words. Wrote BJ Small in the Gettysburg Times, “Marcus made you want to pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee, and escape the world’s troubles. But he wasn’t afraid to tap into serious subjects.”

Wrote his wife Jill in a PennLive tribute, “He always had a million ideas, and unfortunately, we will never know how many interesting stories were still to come.”

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