Author: David Gorsline

Christmas Bird Count 2025: Central Loudoun

Cold front blowing through at mid-day: a sprinkle of rain, then 20+ mph winds. The trees around the Ashburn Library pond were birdier than usual (I spotted a Ruby-crowned Kinglet), as if to compensate for the lack of interesting birds on the pond. The ponds at Graves Lane/Corder Place now have swan decoys posted, perhaps to discourage the Canada Geese, at which task they were moderately successful; unfortunately, they may have discouraged the interesting ducks, too.

We found a few Eastern Bluebirds (Sialia sialis) against the gray skies.

Urban railfanning in PA-NJ

Inspired in part by posts by Classy Whale and Trains Are Awesome, I drove up to the Philadelphia metro to ride some transit services that were new to me.

diesel light railquick shotOn Friday, starting from Trenton, I rode the River Line light rail to Camden to connect to PATCO for a short hop to Philadelphia. Hmm, the heat in my River Line car didn’t seem to be working. While there are plans to renovate/redevelop it, the Walter Rand Transportation Center in Camden is, right now, nothing short of a dump.

one of the seasonsI closed the loop with a SEPTA train back to Trenton. The tile mosaic in Jefferson Station is stunning.

thanks for ridingwaiting and fullSaturday was a bit more enjoyable. Starting from Trenton again, I rode New Jersey Transit’s (NJT) Trenton line to Newark Penn Station, switched to a PATH train and rode it as far as Exchange Place.

view thru light snowlight snowA quick snap of the New York Financial District in some light snow that followed the overnight wintry mix, and then I was off to the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail station.

you are hereyour are here (closer detail)During my 10-minute wait in the chilly weather, I glanced at the rather fine historical map built into the Exchange Place station platform. (I’m still looking for some information about this map.)

not so poshlast one for the tripThe HBLR took me to Hoboken Terminal, where I boarded an NJT train that ran all of two stops to Newark Broad Street. From there, the third of NJT’s light rail systems, the Newark Light Rail, took me back to Newark Penn Station. Completing my round trip on the Trenton line, I was back to Dr. Hardtacks and headed for home.

Hoboken Terminal is a place of drafty, broken grandeur. Flooding from Superstorm Sandy didn’t help the situation. Some stained glass remains, and the vintage benches are still serviceable, but a renovation (also planned) cries out to become reality.

Something the video bloggers don’t talk about much is how much time you spend waiting. Since I was traveling on Saturday, I had a bad connection at Hoboken Terminal and laid over for almost two hours. Fortunately there are two coffee and donut shops still operating there.

In Newark, my first return train was cancelled. There were lots of delays on Amtrak and elsewhere posted on the departure boards, no doubt due in part to the winter storm.

Rules for Living

Sam Holcroft’s Rules for Living is a Christmas puzzle box in which we’re given a look at the characters’ inner lives, sort of Alice Gerstenberg’s Overtones as reimagined by Michael Frayn and Alan Ayckbourn. In this case, each of this hapless family’s secret coping strategies to get through a fraught holiday gathering are projected on a screen, for instance, Matthew must sit and eat in order to tell a lie or Deborah must clean in order to hold her tongue—all to some comic effect. Jonathan Feuer as Adam has the greatest challenge, and he pulls it off, with Adam must use a silly voice (some of them very specific) in order to tell the truth.

Although the Charades sequence is predictable, it does give Naomi Jacobson (Deborah) the opportunity for the biggest laugh of the show without saying a word or moving a muscle. The fate of a solitary empty bowl on an end table is telegraphed from Utah.

  • Rules for Living, by Sam Holcroft, directed by Ryan Rilette, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

I’m all for reusing playbills, but not this one in my hands that has been overly thumbed.

Christmas Bird Count 2025: Seneca

frostingThe CBC for the Seneca count circle took place on 14 December. Overnight left a frosting of snow, followed by dropping temperatures and wind. I lost two counters due to illness, a third to the weather, and a fourth to travel. Nevertheless, my team in sector 14 turned up 47 species (pending returns from one more feeder watcher). Lake Fairfax was nearly completely iced over, with nothing but Canada Geese loafing in the open water and a lonely Ring-necked Duck foraging. Our special birds were (pending review) Cackling Goose (Branta hutchinsii), Broad-winged Hawk (Buteo platypterus), and Orange-crowned Warbler (Leiothlypis celata).

I started an iNaturalist project to keep tabs on possible sightings on future counts. So I was at least able to add a Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis) to the project.

New venues, 2025

Made my last visit to Edward Durell Stone’s Kleenex box for a while.

  • Christ Episcopal Church, Kensington, Md.
  • Ring Auditorium, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington
  • Family Theater, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington
  • Maryland Ensemble Theatre, Frederick, Md.

Meterstones, 2025

Small accomplishments during the year, not otherwise accounted for. Not major milestones, but bigger than inchstones.

  • I completed 1000 hours of service as a Virginia Master Naturalist.
  • I repainted my front door, using a color match of the paint under the kickplate: alas, my cluster association palette calls for a paint color no longer offered by any vendor. My paint job looks OK from the curb, but not that great close up.
  • I’m wrapping up my fifth Christmas Bird Count (CBC) as a sector leader in the Seneca count circle.
  • I earned a Grognard Mirabilaire badge with Wikipedia. Still no barnstars.

By Jimmy Van Heusen: 1

YouTube has been feeding me scratchy videos of Jay Ward’s Fractured Fairy Tales, and I’ve been eating them up. In “The Ugly Almond Duckling,” Edward Everett Horton’s narration opens with a joke that, in the hands of lesser makers, would be the punch line to a shaggy dog story involving Chinese hydrology. It’s a riff on a page from the Great American Songbook that hardly anyone sings any more, “Nancy (with the Laughing Face)”.

My year in contributions, 2025

In time for last-minute tax deductions, here’s my annual list.

What organizations are worthy of support? Please give some consideration to this list.

These are the groups and projects to which I gave coin (generally tax-deductible), property, and/or effort in 2025.

Upcoming: 63

Adjudication assignments for WATCH for 2026 are out. I am scheduled to see:

  • Carrington, Save My Black Soul
  • Tesori/Kron, Fun Home
  • Hamill, Sense and Sensibility
  • Moore/Murray, Tales of the Artisan
  • Dead Air
  • Brickman/Elice/Lippa, The Addams Family

As well as three TBDs.

The Thanksgiving Play

The piece raises an occasional chuckle, but it goes into the bin of the rarely funny genre of Well-Intentioned People Getting It Wrong. There are the easy jokes about pronouns; a pedant stickles about the difference between literally and figuratively to set up another limp joke. There is the outsider who is not what everyone else takes her to be: a Waiting for Guffman trope telegraphed like it was on a fiber optic cable. The clash between art and commercial viability for women is better executed in Jane Martin’s Anton in Show Business.

Shea-Mikal Green as Logan, the director of the no-budget “devised piece” about the American Thanksgiving, does manage to inject some manic energy into this wobbly vehicle.

  • The Thanksgiving Play, by Larissa FastHorse, directed by Suzanne Beal, Maryland Ensemble Theatre, Frederick, Md.