Author: David Gorsline

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

Clifton Institute bioblitz July 2025

On a punishingly hot and muggy July day, we returned to a property that we had biolblitzed last summer. I was able to last about 90 minutes out in the gardens and meadow, and about an hour down where the Rush River joins the Thornton, but then I had to crash on our hosts’ porch. I was sucking wind just climbing a small rise.

In the garden, I documented my first Snowberry Clearwing (Hemaris diffinis). I tried to expand my horizons by looking for leaf miners.

At the rivers, iNaturalist honcho Carrie Seltzer and I found several species of myxomycetes, including the critter that acts like a puffball mushroom, Wolf’s Milk (Lycogala epidendrum). I got a look at a Rappahannock Darter (Etheostoma vexillare) (a Rapp endemic of cool, clean waters) before the rest of the team charged upstream—I just don’t have the footing to follow.

After dinner, activity at the lighted sheets was great. Our big charismatic beetle, Broad-necked Root Borer (Prionus laticollis), settled in at Jeff and Izabella’s setup and stayed all evening. The Scarlet-winged Lichen Moth (Hypoprepia miniata) was shockingly beautiful.

This is National Moth Week. I’m cogitating on getting my own setup for my cubby-hole of a back yard.

TickTalk

Amplifying signal from Maryland Native Plant Society:

With summer officially here, outside activities are on the rise and so too are encounters with ticks. Those who find ticks on themselves or pets are encouraged to donate them to the tick research project run by Dr. Rebekah Taylor at Frostburg State University. This research provides a better understanding about various ticks found in the region and what pathogens they carry, such as the bacteria responsible for Lyme disease. Every donated tick is identified, mapped, and tested. All of the data is uploaded to an open-access website hosted by FieldScope.

Donated ticks should be from the following counties (or areas very close to these counties):

  • Maryland
    • Washington
    • Allegany
    • Garrett
  • Pennsylvania
    • Somerset
    • Bedford
    • Fulton
  • West Virginia
    • Mineral
    • Hampshire
    • Grant
    • Preston

To donate ticks:

  1. Tape the ticks to an index or post card, and note the date and the approximate geographic location where the ticks were encountered.
  2. Place them in a freezer for at least one day to ensure that they are dead before being mailed.
  3. Mail the card to: Dr. Rebekah Taylor, Frostburg State University, 101 Braddock Road, Frostburg MD 21532.

Just before the gun goes off

I don’t know how else to describe the tumult produced by the MRI, so multiform and powerful that it was paralyzing, preventing me from moving forward and even seeing where I was: a chaotic unfurling of enormous sounds, like an alarm siren, an 18-wheeler’s horn, and a jackhammer all mixed together, alternating with mind-numbing jigsaw solos, monstrous duos for crusher and stamping press, vociferous trios for chain saw, grand organs, and rock drill on a counterpoint of a prehistoric ondes Martenot, the whole thing punctuated by constant and contradictory percussion, without order or relation, as if fourteen deaf, psychopathic drummers were facing off in a rage.

—Jean Echenoz, Command Performance, trans. Mark Polizzotti (2020/2025), ch. 35

Clifton Institute dragonfly/damselfly count 2025

Sunday, more of the same heat. We managed about 3-1/2 hours at Leopold’s Preserve before packing it in. Team leader A.J. did find a few Bar-winged Skimmers (Libellula axilena) for us. We also turned up some puzzling spreadwings; here’s a Lestes in need of a species ID. I still struggle with distinguishing Calico and Halloween Pennants.

I decided to forgo my high boots in the interest of keeping cool, and I brought a couple of American Dog Ticks (Dermacentor variabilis) home with me as a result.

Eastern Neck NWR butterflies

Continuing with his series of workshops on troublesome butterfly ID, Rick Borchelt took us to Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge in Kent County, Maryland on a hot and muggy Saturday. The refuge isn’t that far as the crow flies, but we drivers must either cross the swoopy Bay Bridge, then curl around to Chestertown to get across the Chester River, or take the long way around via Elkton.

Zebra Swallowtails were common to abundant. The headline observation was an Aaron’s Skipper (Poanes aaroni) on the same milkweed inflorescence as a couple Broad-winged Skippers (P. viator). I also got a lucky dorsal view of a Delaware Skipper (Anatrytone logan).

In non-butterfly news, I met the also-common Seaside Dragonlet (Erythrodiplax berenice).

Rick’s wrapup post includes a singularly unflattering picture of me (not that it’s difficult to accomplish) in full anti-solar gear.