Author: David Gorsline

Some links: 114

A double shot of Some Links this month.

Birthday getaway 2026

A very short getaway, and a very short trip report to match.

I visited Hickory Hollow Natural Area Preserve in Lancaster County. I didn’t find evidence of the protected lady’s-slipper orchids, but then again, it was the wrong time of the year and I didn’t have any inside info. Crane-fly Orchids (Tipularia discolor) were blooming, however. It was a nice walk all the same. Finding Mutinus elegans was a nice surprise.

Chasing the next Virginia State Parks Trail Quest pin, I hit Caledon SP in King George County, and Culpeper Battlefields SP in Culpeper County, the latter visit “escrowed” until the park is built out and made part of the Trail Quest program. It would be nice to return to Caledon for a morning walk when I’m a little fresher and I can make it down the marsh trail to the river.

654 orange and blueAt Culpeper Battlefields, on the scraped out path to the top of Buford Knoll, I found a new-to-me robber fly, Triorla interrupta, and a new! to! me! tiger beetle, Cicindelidia punctulata. A few butterflies were flying, and some larger flying things were also in the air.

Still here

In about 1981, A. and I took a little trip to Garrett County, Maryland, the triangular bit at the western end of the state, wedged between West Virginia and Pennsylvania. We were hoping for cross-country skiing (we had recently moved from Minneapolis), but there was no snow, so we did a bit of unfocused hiking.

At the crossroads of U.S. 50 and U.S. 219, marked on the map as Red House, we found a roadside restaurant that served up buckwheat pancakes and this amazing link sausage—it was probably smoked, but then prepared like ordinary breakfast sausage. I don’t remember the name, but it was likely something like the Red House Inn.

A few years later, A. and I split up, and then somewhere in the mid 1980s I took a solo trip out U.S. 50 (I think I was driving Algernon) and stopped again at this roadside restaurant. Food still amazing.

And then time continued to pass, and the next time I was out that way I saw that the restaurant was closed. So it goes with mom and pop outfits. East-west traffic on U.S. 50 was perhaps beginning to decline with the opening of I-68 in the northern part of the county.

I'm still hereOn my West Virginia trip with Mark Garland earlier this month, I passed by the place again. It has a new roof, but there are buttresses keeping the walls upright (not visible in the photo). Traffic on U.S. 50 was very sparse, again maybe due to the opening of four-lane U.S. 48 to the south.

The building is now a roadside church. It’s nice to remember my two visits from 40 years ago, and that wonderful sausage.

West Virginia highlands August 2026

welcomeWe scuffled with lodging availability (nearby music festival), a road closure, pop-up thunderstorms, a park closed for an archery tournament, and limited opening hours for visitor centers, and still pulled off an enjoyable two days in the West Virginia highlands on a Nature Forward trip led by Mark Garland. The group visited sites in Blackwater Falls State Park and Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge’s mascot is the Cheat Mountain Salamander (Plethodon nettingi).

The driving to this part of West Virginia follows the somewhat infamous Corridor H highway, signed as U.S. 48. The stretch between Wardensville (just over the Virginia line) and Davis is four lanes divided with intersections at grade, chopping through hills and bridging rivers and valleys.

Mark showed us two new butterflies for me, both in hand: Atlantis Fritillary (Argynnis atlantis) and Meadow Fritillary (Boloria bellona). Participant B. pointed out several nifty day-flying moths, among them Eusarca confusaria, Ctenucha virginica, and Common Ringlet (Coenonympha california). I found two lycophytes new to me, Hickey’s Tree-clubmoss (Dendrolycopodium hickeyi) and Staghorn Clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum) (and). And we puzzled out the ID of a meadowhawk, at last landing on White-faced Meadowhawk (Symptetrum obtrusum).

Mark demonstrated attaching a BlūMorpho transmitter to a Monarch butterfly. Six hundredths of a gram with its own solar panel, and signals from nearby phones with Bluetooth active can be recorded. Wowee!

1746/48Dr. H and Fairfax StoneI hadn’t realized that the Blackwater River, flowing east to west across the region, is part of the Ohio River watershed. Traveling between the valley and my motel in Oakland, Md., I made a short side quest to visit the Fairfax Stone, marking the springs of the North Fork of the Potomac River, the Potomac of course flowing east to Chesapeake Bay.

I also passed through Thomas, W. Va., with a hippy-dippy line of shops along its riverfront. It would be cool to stop in the next time I’m in the area.

Clifton Institute Bioblitz August 2026 (Rappahannock)

Another successful bioblitz, this time to a new property in Rappahannock County. Someone spotted a (ordinarily nocturnal) Tetracha virginica in the parking lot just as we were getting organized, adding to my super-short list of tiger beetles observed. I got a lucky look at a Swarthy Skipper (Nastra lherminier), and the observation got a fave. I tried to focus on graminoids: perhaps my best showing was a Dichanthelium. Rush Skeletonweed (Chondrilla juncea) was a new non-native to me. I got a decent audio recording of Wood Thrush (Hylocichla musterlina).

And there’s always something interesting at the lights after dark. Red-bordered Emerald (Nemoria lixaria) was perhaps the fanciest moth of the night.

Adrift

An entertaining hour-and-a-half of low-tech shenanigans, Medieval style, with a good chunk of vaudeville schtick, from Happenstance Theater. Of the musical accompaniment, the hurdy-gurdy is a nice surprise. Sarah Olmsted Thomas’s demon character is goofily terrifying.

  • Adrift: A Medieval Wayward Folly, produced by Happenstance Theater, Bethesda, Md.

Clifton Institute NABA Butterfly Count 2026

Well, the good news is that the weather was pleasant. The bad news is that the weather was pleasant: cool, cloudy. Hence, very little butterfly activity. I did manage to find Tawny-edged Skippers (Polites themistocles) at two of our survey sites.

New butterfly observers Shanon and Kathy enjoyed the day immensely, so that was gratifying.

Of the non-butterfly species, I found a couple interesting moths (squeaking in to National Moth Week), including Wedgling Moth (Galgula partita). And the team found a handsome Common Green Darner (Anaz junius).

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2026

Best Line Wins does a good job of capturing the flavor of the best-loved sketches from the 1950s and 60s by Mike Nichols and Elaine May, without (as the dramaturg’s notes tell us) infringing on material that is still in copyright.

My Favorite Sociopath is a sharp satire of hypercompetitive journalism graduate students chasing (and besmirching) reputation in the early twilight years of news in print. I wonder what my newsroom colleagues would say. I wonder what Truman Capote would say.

In The Smoker, Lisa D’Amour spins a tale of striving (working-class, middle-class, artistic-class) out of a relatively recent opportunity for socializing, the front stoop nicotine break. There are some interesting doublets, among them two mishaps that fall from the skies. Regina Gibson is particularly winning as Kim, an opera singer with auditions but no gigs, who imagines a prospective hookup in sad detail.

In her interview in the program notes, D’Amour identifies why I am not always taken in by a new play:

[My mentor, Sherry Kramer]… told me that audiences will not tolerate didacticism. They will shut down and not listen. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being lectured to in a play. So this is part of the magic trick of writing a play. It’s a little bit of a sleight of hand. You’re trying to hide what you’re talking about in something very casual, and hopefully by the end of the play, the audience realizes what we were talking about the whole time.

To realize Refugee Rhapsody, cheers for the design and technical crew for accomplishing multiple playing spaces in the white box of Studio 112, chief among them a minimalist apartment for the uber-rich, all cream and ivory right down to the faux Mark Rothko on the wall. How do we frame someone else’s suffering, someone else’s disaster? The question is made concrete in the most theatrical elements of this play.

¡VOS!, by Christina Pumariega, braids together two story lines, a middle-aged woman’s last chance at IVF, and the Argentine military’s 1976 coup that suspended Peronism1 and resulted in tens of thousands of desaparecidos.

A design/direction quibble: a few scenes consist of telephone calls between Annie and her OB-GYN, Dr. Cossi. Annie is where we can easily see her from three sides (in the often challenging Marinoff black box) but Dr. Cossi is at a corner between two of the seating areas, where she can’t easily be seen by many in the audience.

1About which I am rather under-informed.

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
  • The Smoker, by Lisa D’Amour, directed by Shelley Butler
  • Refugee Rhapsody, by Yussef El Guindi, directed Zi Alikhan
  • Best Line Wins, by Beth Kander, directed by Jessica Kubzansky
  • ¡VOS!, by Christina Pumariega, directed by Kimberly Senior
  • My Favorite Sociopath, by Aurin Squire, directed by Céline Rosenthal

Clifton Institute Bioblitz July 2026 (Rappahannock)

Our third visit to this property in Rappahannock County, and there were still some new pockets of habitat to explore. It got pretty muggy and hot in the afternoon, and I slowed down, but I didn’t feel incapacitated like I did last year.

My top observations:

In a heretofore unexplored meadow, American Harlequin (Xanthogramma flavipes), a syrphid fly, and Riley’s Clearwing Moth (Synanthedon rileyana), both species sporting “don’t mess with me” yellow and black stripes. On a bit of wood in that same meadow, fruiting bodies of Physarum viride.

At the lights after dark, Carolina Pine Sawyer (Monochamus carolinensis), a longhorn beetle, Four-spotted Owlfly (Ululodes quadripunctatus), a nocturnal predator in the Neuroptera, and a very handsome tussock moth, Halysidota sp. I gotta invest in a field guide for moths.

I didn’t lose anything this time, but there was an hour and a half of panic when I realized I didn’t have my flip phone. Did I not pick it up from the charger in the morning? Yup, I did not.

Happy decade: 2

20 years, posts have slowed down a bit. A random slice through the 3100+: every 100th post, counting backwards, first sentence, more or less.

  • 25 June 2025: Sunday, more of the same heat.
  • 24 July 2024: Florida’s Commissioner of Education thinks Jane Austen was an American.
  • 30 August 2023: Reminders from John D. Cook and Valerie Tiberius that my next planning session should focus on deciding not to do something.
  • 30 October 2022: One more nuance in Shakespeare to look out for: pronoun choice.
  • 1 August 2021: “The Lost Episodes of I Love Lucy,” by Julian George.
  • 13 August 2020: [Clem] Whitaker and [Leone] Baxter won nearly every [political] campaign they waged….
  • 31 August 2019: More scouting of Rachel Carson Conservation Park, in preparation for next weekend’s walk.
  • 30 September 2018: I attended the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis this past week.
  • 19 November 2017: Keegan Theatre delivers a solid production of this story of the accomplished businesswoman Marlene (Karina Hilleard), recently promoted to managing director of her employment agency, who may be having second thoughts about the sacrifices she has made to ensure her success.
  • 25 November 2016: A message of hope from Vi Hart.
  • 21 February 2016: David Crystal and Ben Crystal talk to Michael Rosen and Laura Wright of BBC Four’s Word of Mouth about Shakespearean Original Pronunciation (OP), with generous audio demonstrations.
  • 30 July 2015: Mark Garland led two days of field trips to various off-the-map locations in southern New Jersey.
  • 8 December 2014: State-of-the-art stormwater management—in Los Angeles?
  • 17 June 2014: Joshua J. Tewksbury et al. make the case for restoring natural history’s importance to answering questions of public health, food security, and biology as a whole.
  • 3 November 2013: Round House Theatre marks its return to more engaging, contemporary material with a balanced ensemble performance of Melissa James Gibson’s This, a romantic comedy-drama for grieving grownups.
  • 15 March 2013: Ian Bogost ends a call.
  • 3 September 2012: Kathleen Akerley premieres another of her enjoyable head-scratchers.
  • 8 February 2012: Dear David L Gorsline: This letter is to acknowledge that Chase has received the funds to pay off your mortgage loan referenced above.
  • 22 September 2011: Eric Fidler answers a question that’s been gnawing on my mind ever since my last ride down North Capitol Street from the Catholic campus: what’s with the brick silos and open fields between Michigan Avenue, N.W., and Channing Street, N.W.?
  • 31 March 2011: Because there is no end, happy or otherwise.
  • 24 October 2010: We had a good, if tiring, time over the last two days talking to the kids visiting the USA Science & Engineering Festival.
  • 24 May 2010: James Ellroy’s editors let him down a few times in the early chapters of American Tabloid.
  • 25 December 2009: Taking a couple of classes, plus a concerted effort to spend more time in the field and documenting it, means I have lots of field trip notes this year.
  • 8 July 2009: The image from Henry Darger used in the cover design of the NYRB’s reissue of a novel from 1929 by Richard Hughes, is apparently all too appropriate, if we trust reviewer Andrew Sean Greer.
  • 7 January 2009: HP is offering to buy back your used computer, PDA, printer, camera, or smartphone—anything with residual value, irrespective of manufacturer, report Gina Trapani and Candace Lombardi.
  • 25 August 2008: I am not this guy, either.
  • 4 April 2008: 60s spandex stunner Yvonne Craig—Batgirl, alter ego of Barbara Gordon, daughter to Police Commissioner Gordon—played by Neil Hamilton: Craig and Hamilton appeared as father and stepdaughter in a 1958 episode of Perry Mason titled “The Case of the Lazy Lover.”
  • 30 October 2007: Fup, mascot of Powell’s Books, has passed away.
  • 9 June 2007: A leader from the traditionally eco-skeptic Economist admits that recycling is “mostly worthwhile,” and proposes three steps to encourage the practice.
  • 4 February 2007: Septime Webre and the Washington Ballet mix it up Latin style with live music—in the lobby, on stage, and in the pit—and Latin works by three choreographers, including a restaging of Webre’s own Juanita y Alicia.
  • 14 September 2006: Tales from the computing trenches, back in the time when we wore those funny flat helmets: Jim Horning’s The Way It Was.

Of the posts above, I didn’t track how many have succumbed to linkrot. Too discouraging.

Hoping that I’m still kicking for a 30-year roundup—hey, that’ll be only 18 months from the Y2K38 apocalypse.

Glacier National Park

My last stop on my May trip was Glacier National Park. My timing wasn’t great: the upper stretches of the Going to the Sun Road were still closed for the season, which meant a long drive from my lodge on the west side of the park around to the east side. More glacier action at Grand Teton (and higher elevation), but I enjoyed my brief visit to Glacier.

buffalo jamBut first I had to get there. The only road going north out of Grand Teton goes through Yellowstone, so I got the nickel tour of that property. Some up-close-and-personal views of Bison bison. The hoofers seemed to be keeping to the southbound side of the road; the traffic was much more backed up in that direction.

don't move the treesleeps twoMy digs on the lodge campus were spartan: a two story cabin called Snyder Hall, which had served several purposes in its lifetime. Private rooms sleep two; bathrooms down the hall.

Saturday the 24th I made that long drive around to the east side to the Sun Point Nature Trail, which yielded some nice wildflowers—White-leaved Cinquefoil (Potentilla pulcherrima) on exposed rocks overlooking Saint Mary Lake; butter-yellow False Rock-loving Cinquefoil (Drymocallis pseudorupestris) on another outcrop visible from the parking lot; Bearberry (A/K/A Kinnikinnick) (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) along the trail; and yet again I did not collect enough information to identify a Castilleja to species—and butterflies—two nice nymphalids, California Tortoiseshell (Nymphalis californica) and Milbert’s Tortoiseshell (Aglais milberti). The trail passed through a burned-over area, so there was nothing to cut the wind, and I retraced my steps.

Back on the west side towards evening, I strolled the Trail of the Cedars. My sources say that the flowers of Pacific Trillium (Trillium ovatum) open as white, but turn purple to red as they mature. And I found a Maianthemum that is not racemosum: a delicate Star-flowered Lily-of-the-Valley (Maianthemum stellaturm).

For my last day in the field, I walked a trail with a loop at the end in the Fish Creek area. I sighted one more squirrel species—Red Squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus)—some green stuff—Pipsissewa (Chimaphila umbellata) showing last year’s fruit and Wood Forget-me-not (Myosotis sylvatica) in flower—and distant Red-necked Grebes (Podiceps grisegena) on Lake McDonald.

Merlin signaled both Hammond’s and Dusky Flycatchers. I got glasses on a couple birds, and photographed one from behind. I don’t know these Empids’ vocalizations. So nothing to confirm an ID to species. Two for next time.

A short visit: maybe worth a trip in another season.

Peculiar muzak: 9

Again, in my neighborhood Safeway: “Cars,” by Gary Numan, ca. 1979. I rather like the song—I saw Numan in concert in Minneapolis (I remember the Orpheum but an online source says the Guthrie?1)—but could there be a more dystopian pop song?

1No, I’m pretty sure was the Orpheum. The opening act would have been Nash the Slash, who appeared masked and playing a guitar-like thing, à la Angine de Poitrine. I don’t remember the name, but the dates line up. He was not well received.

Confirmed! And, holy moley, I was there!

Grand Teton National Park: 2

In the afternoon, after my short climbing adventure, I did a driving tour of Antelope Flats. At a pullout near a bridge over Carpenter Draw I found some beautiful gnarly bark on a Narrowleaf Cottonwood (Populus angustifolia). Merlin-assisted again, I found a lifer Vesper Sparrow (Pooecetes gramineus).

Returning to my lodge, on US 191, I found a distant bull Elk (Cervus canadensis) and my first herd of Bison (Bison bison).

Next day, 21 May, there was a frosting of snow from overnight at the lodge, with rain in the forecast for the morning. I needed to do laundry, so—

my rideIn the afternoon, trying to stay out of the wind, I walked the approach to Grand View Point. Here’s my rental Nissan Altima; she was very bossy about lane drift and other peccadilloes of my driving, so she never got a name.

I found a few interesting small wildflowers. However, the big surprise caught on the way back to the car: a stirring in the forb layer just to the left of the trail, and then out sauntered a Dusky Grouse (Dendragapus obscurus)! This sighting brought my total of life birds for the trip to nine, rather more than I expected/hoped for.

closed areaMy last day in the Park called for some flexibility. I was planning to explore Willow Flats, in search of more Moose and other good things, but the area was closed due to bear activity. So I pieced together some walks on Lunch Tree Hill, around the Colter Bay area, and the easy part of the Lupine Meadows trail. I met yet another new ground squirrel, Uinta Ground Squirrel (Urocitellus armatus). At Colter Bay, I spied a group of about six of them making use of horse dung. Another new butterfly, Large Marble (Euchloe ausonides). And I achieved another objective: a fine photo of American Dipper (Cinclus mexicanus) (one of my favorite birds) at the bridge over Cottonwood Creek on the way to Lupine Meadows.

13/10 would come again.