Author: David Gorsline

Reporting antics

She remembered her days as a television interviewer, her beguiling confidence and charm; here as nowhere else they must understand how that was a sham. Her acting was another matter. The things she was ashamed of were not what they must think she was ashamed of; not a flopping bare breast, but a failure she couldn’t seize upon or explain.

* * *

The thing she was ashamed of, in acting, was that she might have been paying attention to the wrong things, reporting antics, when there was always something further, a tone, a depth, a light, that she couldn’t get and wouldn’t get.

—Alice Munro, “Who Do You Think You Are?”, The Beggar Maid

At the park: 54

Nesting season at Huntley Meadows Park has started already. Excerpts from my e-mail report to park staff from Sunday’s work day:

Every year, or so it seems, the birds start nesting earlier. We have 7 Hooded Merganser eggs in box #1, and another hoodie flushed from box #10. Photographers also report that a Wood Duck drake has also been hanging about this area at the beginning of the boardwalk.

We checked the other boxes in the wetland and topped up the wood chips. Box #6 looks to be in serviceable condition — no need to replace it this year. The latch on #62 is troublesome, as it has swollen and rusted in the weather; I will look for a screw-lock ring that fits it better.

Target winter species observed: Northern Pintail, Northern Shoveler, Green-winged Teal

Water gauge reading: 0.32

coming soonConstruction for the wetland restoration project is really finally happening this year. Here’s a view upstream along Barnyard Run, back toward the observation tower. Expect this reach to look very different in a few months.

Munro decoded

Flo kept the candy up behind the counter, on a slanted shelf, in open boxes, out of reach but not out of sight of children. Rose had to watch her chance, then climb up on the stool and fill a bag whatever she could grab—gum drops, jelly beans, licorice allsorts, maple buds, chicken bones.

—Alice Munro, “Privilege,” The Beggar Maid

Chicken bones? This old-timey confection turns out to be a hard candy tube, usually butterscotch or molasses, filled with peanut butter and rolled in cocoanut. The actual candy doesn’t sound any more palatable than its metaphorical tenor.

There is another version, cinnamon stuffed with bittersweet chocolate, from Ganong of New Brunswick, that sounds much tastier.

She went into the dining to check the money she had saved from Family Allowance checks. It was in the bottom of the silver muffin dish. Thirteen dollars. She meant to add that to what Patrick gave her to get to Victoria.

—”Mischief,” The Beggar Maid

Canada’s Family Allowance program went into effect in 1945 as its first non-means-tested income redistribution plan. At the time the story takes place (about 1960?), Rose would have received about six dollars a month for her daughter Anna. Reforms of the program in the 1970s began to wear away at its universal subsidy provisions; the program was completely replaced with the Child Tax Benefit program in 1992.

Sax-Zim Bog

The weather cooperated with me for my visit to the Sax-Zim Bog Birding Festival in northeastern Minnesota. Though the temperature never rose above freezing, the snow and wind held off until I had departed for home. Saturday’s field trip covered the bog in St. Louis County, while Sunday we ranged up and down the shore of Lake Superior.

Good weather means good birds, and I got good looks at many of them. A total species count of about 35, with 10 lifers, good enough for me to break the 400 mark. Some highlights:

industrial landscapeLifer Common Goldeneye (Bucephala clangula) as well as Long-tailed Duck (Clangula hyemalis) at Agate Bay, where immense ore loading facilities loomed. In this part of the country, the unit trains loaded with dark gray rock are carrying iron ore, not coal.

ducks, bridge, and lightfar endBetter looks at the goldeneyes in Duluth Harbor, and enough of them to sort through in hopes of finding a Barrow’s. A squatty lighthouse marks the channel into the harbor.

Multiple views of Pine Grosbeaks (Pinicola enucleator) and two species of redpolls at a couple of stops, including one at a feeder station run by the friends group. The porta-john at this stop was the cleanest, most well-appointed one I’ve ever seen. And purple!

yes, it's a borealI wasn’t even expecting a lot of success with owls, but I picked up four new birds in this family. The Boreal Owl (Aegolius funereus), sitting calmly in a bare tree about 15 feet above Admiral Road, was a new bird for a lot of us, hence the pileup of birders and vehicles.

A scamper over to Superior, Wisconsin to see two Snowy Owls (Nyctea scandiaca) (yet another life tick) at Richard I. Bong Airport.

We did most of our birding from our transport, school buses driven masterfully by Dan and Amy, with quick sallies outside with the scopes. While this approach to birding involves a lot of window maintenance (wiping and scraping condensation), it’s nice not to have to carry the scope very far.

no woodpeckers todayWe did get a little walking in, in an unsuccessful attempt at some woodpecker specialties. The woody vegetation in the bog is made up of spruce, larch, aspen, and birch, with whips of willows in clumps. The peaty soils also support sundews and lady’s slippers (sleeping under this February snow).

first dayit's warm insideHome base for the festival is the community center at Meadowlands, the sort of place that would be a VFW hall if Meadowlands were a big enough town to support a VFW. The amenties were spartan, but clean and effective.

still in businessbio breakOn Saturday’s trip, a bio break at the fire station in the hamlet of McDavitt was much appreciated by the group.

KUMD 103.3 kept me company on each of the 1-hour drives from Duluth to the bog and back again.

Hmm, the literature says that Connecticut Warbler is a specialty nester at the bog. Maybe a trip during the breeding season is in order.

Ready for my trip to Aleppo

My consultant’s badge for my new client has this awesome legend on the back:

All Authorities are requested to cooperate in facilitating the movement and emergency mission of this bearer.

Well, “awesome” isn’t quite the word for it. “Humbling” is better: a reminder that some people work at a job where they don’t get to come home every night to a warm bed and a roof.

Some links: 64

Clearing the bookmarks for things that I had intended to post more fully about:

  • William J. Ripple and Robert L. Beschta report on trophic effects due to reintroduction of Gray Wolf (Canis lupus) into Yellowstone National Park. Some herbivore species are down, but aspens, cottonwoods, and willows are up. And, perhaps surprisingly, species that depend on woody plants like beavers are up, too.
  • The key to Broadway success might be in assembling a creative team with a mix of old hands and newcomers, suggests research by Guimerà et al. and summarized by Matt Golosinski for Northwestern’s KelloggInsight. The optimal number of team members has remained constant at seven since about 1930.
  • Vi Hart’s “Doodling in Math Class” videos (independent, pre-Khan Academy) are smart and delightful. Perhaps the centerpiece is her three-part demystification of the Fibonacci sequence.

    I am as far as possible from the only two other leaves in the universe!

  • Related: Alexander Mitsos and Corey Noone report that the optimal arrangement of mirrors in a solar energy collector follows the pattern of a Fermat spiral.

Northern Virginia owls: 2

As trip leader Leon likes to point out, owling has more in common with fishing than birding. Sometimes the conditions are right, and the birds just don’t show.

We did get a good look at the physical evidence of Barn Owls at Loudoun County’s Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve—feathers, numerous pellets, whitewash, and a roost/nest box installed at the top of the first abandoned farm silo on the property—but no luck looking at birds. Stakeout spots for Bubo and Otus species didn’t pan out. We’ll get ’em next time.

Good People

David Lindsay-Abaire puts aside the wacky characters and situations of some of his earlier work (Wonder of the World, Fuddy Meers) and plays it straighter in his new Good People. But his signature damaged people are still present to fuel this sober comedy set in Boston’s Southie neighborhood.

Margaret (Johanna Day) has spent her working life getting (and losing) a series of minimum-wage jobs, barely keeping a household together for her and her developmentally-disabled daughter Joyce. When Mike (Andrew Long), a boy she knew from high school 30 years earlier, returns to the city as a successful endocrinologist and with a very young bride, Margaret reluctantly approaches him with the thin hope of a hand up—a job as a receptionist, a referral to one of his well-to-do friends, anything. Precisely how well Mike and Margaret knew each other all those years before is the information, gradually given to us, that drives the plot.

In the second-act confrontation among Margaret, Mike, and his wife Kate (Francesca Choy-Kee), in Mike and Kate’s posh home in Chestnut Hill, everyone gets his say. In particular, Margaret makes a strong case that the line between success and failure is quite fine. Hard work will only get you so far; what’s needed is a lucky break or someone else’s sacrifice. And what should be sacrificed is not always obvious.

Yet there is a distance between us and the three characters, a separation—perhaps it is Lindsay-Abaire’s comic facility?—that makes it difficult for us to make a connection with them. And the epilogue (fraught with its own staging problems) casually imparts a key piece of information that many of us might miss.

I like the misdirection of an expensive-looking prop in a precarious spot that doesn’t end its stage time with a crash.

  • Good People, by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Jackie Maxwell, Arena Stage Kreeger Theater, Washington