Month: July 2012

If you can’t say something nice…

One of the connections I did not make in the Wikipedia article for Ludlow Griscom that I am expanding is his dislike of Texas ornithologist H. C. Oberholser. I have transcribed many of Oberholser’s migration cards as part of the Bird Phenology Project. Griscom butted heads with a lot of his colleagues; I don’t think that he and I would have got along. But this zinger, quoted in William E. Davis, Jr, Davis, Dean of the Birdwatchers: A Biography of Ludlow Griscom (1994), is too good to keep to myself. It’s from a letter to Guy Emerson in 1943:

I happen to have known Oberholser very well indeed over a long period of years. While I have every esteem for him as an ornithologist, as a man and a human being he is a mean spirited hypocrite and, in spite of his scientific distinction, got himself detested by every ornithologist in the United States. For years his colleagues in the National Museum and the Biological Survey looked forward with keen anticipation to the happy day when he would finally reach the retiring age, and all of them would enjoy writing a sonofobituary address. (p. 150)

Rachel Carson Conservation Park

For our second field trip to look at invasive non-native plants of the mid-Atlantic, Carole took us to Rachel Carson Conservation Park, a darling gem of 650 acres in northeastern Montgomery County.

native and plantedMost of what Carole had to show us were success stories about the restoration of this former agricultural land. In the meadow, warm season grasses like Indian Grass (Sorghastrum nutans) have been planted and are thriving. Autumn Olive (Elaeagnus umbellata) is generally under control.

another comebackpucker upNaturally occurring Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana) (ripening fruit at right) is avoided by the deer, for some reason. Goldenrod is also making a comeback.

Unfortunately, at the forest edges, Polygonum perfoliatum is still running wild, just barely checked by the Japanese Beetles that find it as tasty as home cooking (which it is, for them). Carole is less concerned about the non-native Foxtail Grass (Setaria sp.), whose nodding heads you can see in the background above.

ridgelineIn the woods, we found two of my favorite plants. Spotted Wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata) was showing some fruit. I like this plant a lot, because it’s fairly easy to spot and identify. At a ridgeline, Chestnut Oaks (Quercua prinus) were in control. I like its chunky bark and its disdain for the good soils of the bottomlands.

doomedAt the end of the ridge, Carole showed us a mature American Chestnut (Castanea dentata), blighted yet nevertheless putting out flowers and fruit. It is likely to succumb eventually, but it continues to throw out suckerish regrowth.

more work to doThere are patches in the woods, however, that are still works in progress. This old farmstead was ablaze with Oriental Bittersweet before Carole’s machete-wielding team attacked. Now the battle is against the sprawling Polygonum.

shingles?gallingHeading down into the stream valley, the trails show evidence of scouring. But in a section that has been reclaimed from the big vines, Carole was able to show us Shingle Oak (Quercus imbricaria) along with its characteristic galls, formed by a cynipid wasp.

hawling what?The Park’s east-west axis is the Hawlings River, which rises west of the park and flows to the Patuxent. The group spotted several little patches of Cranefly Orchis (Tipularia discolor)—in flower but long before the autumn emergence of its two-toned leaf. We looked at some additional restoration work; Carole likes to use Christmas Fern (Polystichum acrostichoides) (what a jawbreaker of a name!) because it stabilizes the soil and deer don’t like to eat it. Back in the meadow, we smelled two species of mountain mint (Pycnanthemum spp.) and a Monarda.

Bird life in the park sounded good: we heard Wood Thrush, Acadian Flycatcher, Common Yellowthroat. Eastern Bluebirds were hanging around, perhaps influenced by the nest boxes that were mounted in the meadow.

somewhere in MarylandBonus plant for the trip was the tiny Asplenium montanum, a Montgomery County rarity.

Church

The piece is a series of monologues in which the speakers bear witness of their experience in the evangelical practice of Christianity. There is no discernible narrative arc. Kevin Hasser, as Reverend Jose, does well with his texts: when we first meet him, he is endearing and sincere, but he soon slips off the rails into hallucinatory ecstasy.

  • Church, by Young Jean Lee, directed by Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

Changes

Laurie Goodstein recaps the uneasy relations between the Vatican and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. My sympathies are with the American nuns, led by Sister Pat Farrell:

“We have a differing perspective on obedience,” Sister Farrell said. “Our understanding is that we need to continue to respond to the signs of the times, and the new questions and issues that arise in the complexities of modern life are not something we see as a threat.”

Erm, not really

Andrew Hacker and his fact checker commit a howler in an op-ed piece in which he argues that it’s not necessary to teach algebra to high schoolers:

Mathematics, both pure and applied, is integral to our civilization, whether the realm is aesthetic or electronic. But for most adults, it is more feared or revered than understood. It’s clear that requiring algebra for everyone has not increased our appreciation of a calling someone once called “the poetry of the universe.” (How many college graduates remember what Fermat’s dilemma was all about?)

Pierre de Fermat had a primality test, a little theorem, a principle, and a last theorem (eventually, voluminously proved), but whether he had any dilemmas is a question best asked of his spiritual advisor.

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2012

The unexpected emergent themes of this year’s festival are power cuts and educating our children.

Gidion’s Knot deals with a precociously literary fifth-grade boy whose violent revenge fantasies, expressed in a brutal lyricism, end rather badly. Set designer Margaret McKowen transforms the white box CCA performance space into a colorful classroom for 11-year-olds, fitted with a crafts resource center and marvelously bedecked with posters of the presidents. Audience seating in movable broad-armed chairs creates a few sight line problems.

Joey Collins as Bobby enlivens Neil LaBute’s In a Forest, Dark and Deep, an otherwise conventional story of sexual and emotional betrayal: most of the turns in the plot’s road are well marked with warning signs. Bobby is a ne’er-do-well carpenter in a small college town, someone who talks too loud (and yet Collins knows when to drop his volume to make a point) but finds a way to get ‘er done. His monologue about a long-suffering Iraq veteran’s wife, and about what Bobby will and won’t do, is especially striking.

The Exceptionals, by Bob Clyman, is the festival’s most thought-provoking piece, and its most confusing. Two mothers, Gwen (the guarded Rebecca Harris) and Allie (festival favorite Anne Marie Nest), have borne sons with sperm donated by men of exceptional genetics. Offered the opportunity to further advance their boys’ development by enrollment in an experimental school, they must both make sacrifices and jettison some cognitive baggage. I say thought-provoking, because the play raises questions like the degree to which we push our children’s intellectual development at the expense of their socialization. What profits a first-grader who can solve quadratic equations if he can no longer just play ball or hang out with his dad? As a adult, there is the hard nut of failing to live to one’s potential. Is walking away from an advanced degree with only a thesis defense to be completed ever a good idea?

I say confusing, because it’s difficult to understand whose story the play is telling us, complicated as it is with a subplot about illicit contact with a donor. Certainly it’s not that of the boys, Ethan and Michael, who exist for us only as shadows and distorted audio. Is it the mothers who make the journey? Is it Claire (stiff-backed Deidre Madigan), genetics researcher and Montessoriesque schoolmistress, who brackets the action with a pair of monologues about raising children as if they were hothouse flowers? Claire manipulates the women, driving them through an emotional maze that is mirrored by Lucina Stecconi’s set, all free-flowing corners and no doors–only starting points and goals.

Captors, based on the book Eichmann in My Hands by Peter Z. Malkin and Harry Stein, is an overwritten exercise, the sort of dreary historical reenactment that the festival is sometimes prone to (Miss Golden Dreams, Mary and Myra). Joey Collins (as Malkin) and Philip Goodwin (as Eichmann) are quite good—but read the book, instead.

Bess Wohl’s Barcelona is the strongest production of the five. It begins as a sexy comic romp set in the title city, a casual pickup between a woman sowing her bachelorette’s wild oats and a lonely, brooding Spaniard. It morphs into a genuine dialog between Old World and New about mourning and moving on, about taking responsibility for one’s actions. Anne Marie Nest is Irene, the tipsy real estate agent from Colorado, and Jason Manuel Olazàbal is the rock-steady Manuel. Nest’s monologue about slipping into her client’s lives, sitting on their conveyable sofas and holding imaginary tea parties, is delicious.

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
  • Gidion’s Knot, by Johna Adams, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • The Exceptionals, by Bob Clyman, directed by Tracy Brigden
  • In a Forest, Dark and Deep, by Neil LaBute, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Captors, by Evan M. Weiner, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Barcelona, by Bess Wohl, directed by Charles Morey

Black Hill invasives

mixed blessingSunday brought us back to Black Hill Regional Park, this time with Carole Bergmann in the first of two field trips to look at invasive non-indigenous plant species. We explored an area quite close to the patch where Baltimore Checkerspots are being reared. The newly-paved hard-surface Black Hill Trail, which snakes through the park property, is a mixed blessing. This hike-bike trail, much wider than the footpath it replaced, exposes more forest floor to daylight, allowing opportunists like Japanese Stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum) to take over.

still tastyAnother common invasive to be found in the park, one that I am less familiar with, is Wineberry (Rubus phoenicolasius), a tasty raspberry cousin with impossibly red drupes. It hopscotches across habitat by sending out hairy red canes that droop over and root when they touch ground.

long pastOne of the bad guys we met in Karen Molines’ spring class, Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is all done by this time of year, leaving nothing but dry stalks.

mile a secondBut Mile-a-Minute, a/k/a Asiatic Tearthumb (Polygonum perfoliatum), is just coming into fruit. This annual will continue producing fruit and seeds until frost.

Even though Polygonum and Microstegium can form dense mats that choke out all diversity in the ground cover, Carole (in her capacity as botanist for the county park system) gives less management attention to sprawling and trailing species like these and more to climbing vines and shrubs like Oriental Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus). These are species that can weaken and kill mature oaks and hickories and hence open up yet more gaps in the canopy. While the bittersweet is the bane of upcounty forests, in the south the big problem is Porcelainberry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata).

Near the boat landing area, Carole showed us a meadow that had been largely restored. Most of the Autumn Olive (Elaeagnus umbellata) has been removed, and Spotted Knapweed (Centaurea stoebe), a thistle lookalike that is usually thought of as a pest of the west, is under control.

lunchBonus invertebrate for the trip was this Wheel Bug (Arilus cristatus) munching on a Japanese Beetle.

More than smooches

David M. Watson and Matthew Herring present an intriguing open-access paper: it presents the results of a removal experiment, quantifying the striking effect to which mistletoes serve as a keystone resource in Australian forests. The contribution of these parasitic species to leaf litter and the nutrient cycle is one of the factors favoring bird diversity, the authors report.

ᔥ The Economist

Damage control

Meera Subramanian reports on current efforts to reduce bat and bird mortality at wind turbine sites. Progress has been made even at the eagle-deadly Altamont Pass.

In Cádiz [in Spain], temporarily shutting down turbines has worked because the biggest threat is to migratory birds, which pass through only occasionally. Similar methods could reduce mortalities along the migratory bottlenecks in Central America, Europe and Asia, says Miguel Ferrer, a conservation biologist at Doñana and a co-author of the Cádiz study.

But that tactic will not work in Altamont Pass, which has both migratory and permanent avian populations. Instead, companies there are making headway by replacing small, ageing turbines with fewer large ones. Choosing sites carefully can help, too. “Raptors do not use the landscape randomly,” explains Doug Bell, wildlife programme manager with the East Bay Regional Park District, which manages parklands and monitors wind farms around Altamont.

Good on ya: 8

Scott Mortimer’s baseball card project is personal, unique, committed: he’s seeking a autograph for every card from the 1983 Fleer set. Of the run of 660 cards, he needs 99 more. He makes progress with many visits to ball parks, personal letters, trades with other collectors, and that enabler of obsessives everywhere, the internet.

[Mortimer] has made discoveries along the way. Ken Smith, a Braves first baseman, worked as a car dealer; Terry Felton, a Twins pitcher, as a captain in a sheriff’s office in Louisiana; Ben Hayes, a Reds pitcher, as the president of the New York/Penn League.

“Biff Pocoroba — what a great name,” Mortimer said, referring to a Braves catcher. “You know what he does now? He owns a sausage company.”

Rainbow Compsons

Faulkner meets Danielewski in multiple shades of awesome: the Folio Society, which heretofore I have associated with expensive, overdone editions of books that are never read, is releasing an edition of The Sound and the Fury that responds to Faulkner’s hope that each timeframe of the Benjy chapater be printed in a distinct color of ink. Expediency forced Faulkner and his publishers to rely on shifts between Roman and Italic type to denote the changes.

The Folio Society … drew on the expertise of two noted Faulkner scholars to work on fulfilling Faulkner’s idea. Stephen M. Ross and Noel Polk undertook the painstaking task of identifying each different time-level to be coloured, while keeping the original italic/roman shifts. We can never know if this is exactly what Faulkner would have envisaged, but the result justifies his belief that coloured inks would allow readers to follow the strands of the novel more easily, without compromising the ‘thought-transference’ for which he argued so passionately.

ᔥ The Morning News