VNPS 2025: Dragon’s Tooth and Grassy Hill

Two short walks on the lower reaches of rocky trails to Roanoke area specialties.

Bradley Simpson steered us on the trail to Dragon’s Tooth in Roanoke County—we didn’t traverse any of the truly rugged patches. The destination species here is Buffalo Nut (Pyrularia pubera), found in fruit by participant S between the parking area and the biffy. Buffalo Nut is kin to Piratebush in that both are hemiparasitic, and Piratebush can also be found at Dragon’s Tooth.

persistingOther goodies included generous blooms of Collinsonia canadensis, Autumn Coralroot (Corallorhiza odontorhiza) in fruit, and a bit of Bowman’s Root (Gillenia trifoliata) (thanks, SA!) showing one spent flower. This Chestnut Oak (Quercus prinus) is giving some staying power vibes.

Nate Silver, helpful guide from last year, took us on part of the Slope Trail at Grassy Hill NAP. As with Dragon’s Tooth, much of the flora here was done flowering and fruiting, for example a skullcap (Scutellaria sp.), Clasping Milkweed (Asclepias amplexicaulis), Canadian Burnet (Sanguisorba canadensis), and Goat’s Rue (Tephrosia virginiana).

We didn’t get high enough to find the poster child for the Preserve, but Nate gave me a tip on where to find fameflower on my next trip to Franklin County. And he did locate a lovely patch of flowering Blue Monkshood (Aconitum uncinatum) for us.

On my drives downstate, I usually see a sign for some community activity that rings my WTF bells. This time it was cow pie bingo. Hmm, it looks like I wouldn’t have to travel far to play.

Richmond getaway 2025

I did a short weekend in Richmond, anchored by the Virginia Master Naturalists conference. I attended only one field trip, and one indoor session. A few of the sessions duplicated webinars that I’ve attended recently. But it was nice to walk a bit with Johnny Townsend on trails at Pony Pasture (where I had visited with Genevieve Wall last year.)

Friday was hot, so for my first visit to Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden (free! thanks, Friends of National Arboretum reciprocal membership), I ducked into the shade as much as I could.

Today started out cool and rainy. My intent was to stop by Widewater State Park for a quick visit. Giving the rain a chance to blow off, I took the long way home on U.S. 1 instead of I-95. Widewater, though small and designed for water access, had a few treats to offer: a single inflorescence of Marsh Fleabane (Pluchea odorata), a pollinator garden bursting with Bidens and host to two new moths for me, Goldenrod Stowaway (Cirrhophanus triangulifer) and Hawaiian Beet Webworm Moth (Spoladea recurvalis), and some late Summer Azures. Osprey, Belted Kingfisher, and Double-crested Cormorant scooting about on Aquia Creek.

Elklick Woodlands meadow

shoulder deep in itA quick report from the meadow unit of Elklick Woodlands Natural Area Preserve, accompanied by Darko Veljkovic and other Fairfax County Park Authority Staff. No trail, just bushwhacking through this property that’s been under restoration, with prescribed burns last year and the year before. Still lots of non-natives to be winkled out, but the Bidens aristosa are having a great time. We also found Sweet Everlasting (Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium), a relative of pussytoes.

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Since I like to pick apart scientific names of plants, let’s look at the name of Spicebush (Lindera benzoin), whose fruits are just now ripening to red here in the mid-Atlantic. That benzoin is interesting; it suggests benzene. Do they have something in common? And which came first?

Well, it’s easy to figure out which came first, as Linnaeus named the plant in the 18th century, while Kekulé worked out the structure of benzene (the simplest aromatic hydrocarbon) in the 19th century, after Michael Faraday and others first isolated the chemical and named it earlier in the century. Benzene (benzin, benzol) was derived from benzoic acid, which in turn was derived from gum benzoin. Gum benzoin, known since antiquity, is an aromatic resin made from the bark of several species of trees in the genus Styrax.

So where did the word benzoin come from? Doesn’t sound very Latin. It’s traced back to Middle French benjoin, to Catalan benjuí, to Arabic لُبَان جَاوِيّ (lubān jāwiyy, “Javanese frankincense”).

And just to bring it back home, we have two native species of Styrax in Virginia, American Snowbell (S. americanus) and Bigleaf Snowbell (S. grandifolius). Both are found in the southern counties of the state.

At the park: 155

Finally closing out my reports for the Wood Duck and Hooded Merganser nesting season:

It’s not yet Labor Day, so I’m calling this report on time. Here’s our season totals.

Our Wood Ducks started one more clutch than 2024 (11 vs. 10), but lost 5 of them (3 to predation, 2 to abandonment). 111 eggs laid, 61 hatched, 55% estimated fledging success.

Our Hooded Mergansers started two more clutches than last year (4 vs. 2); 1 was lost to abandonment. 51 eggs laid, 33 hatched, 65% estimated fledging success.

It’s a typical pattern year-to-year that the HOMEs start fewer clutches but achieve about 10 points better fledging success.

Of the 16 boxes, 12 were used. We had double clutches in 3 of the boxes, with 5 of the 6 clutches successful — including one clutch that did not hatch until an estimated 8 July.

As I noted above, we lost 3 clutches to predation, presumably to Black Rat Snakes in all 3 cases. Plus, we found snakes in two other boxes; these may have consumed eggs that we didn’t have the opportunity to count.

Pennyfield Lock

Genevieve Wall led a walk for Nature Forward, meeting at Pennyfield Lock on the C&O Canal. I’ll switch it up a bit and blockquote the follow-up message I sent to her, with a bit of editing:

Hackberry Emperor topside (dorsally) shows a pattern of white and dark spots across a ground of dark brown to tan. Appalachian Brown dorsally is more or less allover brown, except for the eyespots.

I said that checkerspots and Polygonia spp. are in separate groups — that’s incorrect. They’re both in the Nymphalidae (Brushfoots) family.

Thanks for the tip about red coloration in Johnson Grass.

I’ll ask around about that mystery vine with prickles that we looked at with C.

*New observations for me!

Some links: 109

A mystery: 31

A word that pops up in Elmer Rice’s Street Scene, both the stage play (1929) and the screenplay (1931):

SHIRLEY [to SAM, referring to ROSE]. I don’t see, just when you’re graduating from college, why you want to get mixed up with a little batzimer like that!

Shirley (played by Anna Konstant [or Ann Kostant]) pronounces it BATE-sim-uh, or something like that, which suggests that it might also be transcribed as behtzimmer.

The closed captioning on the TCM streaming version of the film doesn’t even try to transcribe the word.

Modulo some search hits on the name of a porn performer, the only thing that turns up is some semi-speculation in a comment thread, suggesting the word has a connection to bathroom. But I’m not convinced, because that would suggest a pronunciation like BAHT-sim-uh.

German bettzimmer is bedroom, perhaps more promising.

It could always be something that Rice heard wrong, or just made up.

Wakefield Park grasses and things

the easementAnother hot, muggy morning, another walk in the power line easement of Wakefield Park. I’ve explored this stretch several times, this time again with the Grass Bunch.

The only new species that I recorded an observation for is Delicate Cycnia Moth (Cycnia tenera), A/K/A Dogbane Tiger Moth, conveniently posed on a bit of dogbane. Aw, snap! I saw this species at a bioblitz two summers ago. But! Partridge Pea (Chamaecrista fasciculata) is a new species for my observations.

helloHello Kitty observations don’t count in iNaturalist.

Clifton Institute NABA Butterfly Count 2025

I returned for the second year to the Wildcat Mountain property as co-sector leader. (Hmm, I see that I didn’t post any trip report for the 2024 count.) We all survived the heat and humidity: MK and Lili had the smart idea to stage a vehicle at the bottom of the hill so that we didn’t have to trudge back up the slope.

Nothing too exciting. Scads of Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus); I got a look at but no photo of Red-banded Hairstreak (Calycopis cecrops); I got identifiable photos of Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor).

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2025: 3

Two monologists to round out the festival.

Kevin Kling, storyteller from Minnesota, brings a bundle of endearing material to the Marinoff stage. His stories, sometimes equally harrowing and goofy (being struck by lightning, riding shotgun in a small plane with his father flying into a fog bank), are supported by multi-instrumentalist Robertson Witmer. The set by David M. Barber puts Kling in a Joseph Cornell box, deep cosmic blue, angel’s wings, painted portraits.

Kling has an extensive back catalog on NPR, from back in the days when we could spare six or seven minutes for a unique voice.

Cody Leroy Wilson, Asian American son of a Vietnamese mother and a West Virginia farmer, gives a voice and a face to the Vietnamese family that he can never know. His mother, adopted from an orphanage during the Vietnam War (some of us do remember the horror, whether at home or deployed), has no memory of her parents, that is, Wilson’s grandparents. What might have happened? Well, the title of the piece gives it all away.

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
  • Kevin Kling: Unraveled, by Kevin Kling, with music by Robertson Witmer, directed by Steven Dietz
  • Did My Grandfather Kill My Grandfather?, by Cody Leroy Wilson, directed by Victor Malana Maog

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2025: 2

In Magdalene, Mark St. Germain, continuing to mine the vein of real-life people who have become clouded in mythology, gives us an imagined meeting between Simon Peter, soon to become first in the line of Catholic popes, and the titular Mary, soon to be sidelined as an important figure in the Christian faith. The work probes the uncomfortable inconsistencies across the various accounts in the century following Jesus’s death;1 asks why there are no women priests in Catholicism; and challenges the notion that a physical church is necessary for practice of the Christ’s worship.2 As St. Germain notes in his playwright interview, “it’s not something that could play in the Kennedy Center right now.” What does a parable mean? Wherein lies a miracle? These are the play’s questions.

Something I can’t unhear: the idea that when speaking of Peter, never the sharpest tool in the shed, Jesus meant Matthew 16:18 as a joke.

The festival has backed up the production with a sturdy dramaturgical note and many links for additional reading.

1How much would you trust a strictly oral account, handed down by his advisers and their successors, of what Warren Harding did and said?

2St. Germain’s Mary reminds Peter that Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the landlords.”

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
  • Magdalene, by Mark St. Germain, directed by Elena Araoz

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2025: 1

Side Effects May Include… is not a play so much as it is a dramatized version of a previously published memoir of Loomer’s struggles with her son’s akathisia, a debilitating, somewhat mysterious movement disorder linked to both genetics and medication. This is not to take away from solid ensemble work by Sophie Zmorrod, Susan Lynskey, and Jimmy Kieffer.

Happy Fall: A Queer Stunt Spectacular is, in a sense, a nostalgic return to 1980, when it wasn’t safe to be out, and before AIDS replaced one scourge for another—before CGI, green screens, and all that jazz. It’s a love story between two stuntmen, an aging Tom Cruise type and a young upstart with some serious Eve Harrington vibes. We do see some fancy fights (my teachers call fight choreography “ballet with dangerous props”) and wire work, and a practice dummy takes some of the lines, but we don’t really learn that much about stunt work.

Do the multiple framing devices get in the way? I’m not sure. The trope of the 8-week movie shoot that runs over to 9 months, however, is a little forced.

Credit is due to Stefania Bulbarella’s projection design; Se Hyun Oh’s set is packed with scrims and TV monitors.

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
  • Side Effects May Include…, by Lisa Loomer, directed by Meredith McDonough
  • Happy Fall: A Queer Stunt Spectacular, by Lisa Sanaye Dring, with Rogue Artists Ensemble, directed by Ralph B. Peña