Author: David Gorsline

At the park: 44

We did our last full check of all the nest boxes on Sunday. Three more boxes hatched out; one box with only two eggs was apparently predated. We have two boxes with eggs remaining that M.K. will check as she is checking warbler boxes.

Val Kitchens and others have reported sightings of Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) in the park, but we were not so fortunate to spot the bird. As a hemi-marsh breeder, it’s a bird of special interest to park management.

M.K. showed us photos of the two snakehead fish that Dave Lawlor and staff took from the waters around box #13.

spot the damselUp at the north end of the wetland, where we find all the trash that washes down from the subdivisions, the Lizard’s Tail (Saururus cernuus) was waist-high, making trash-picking a non-project. Would that the damselfly in this image had busied itself with the mosquitoes that were chomping on me.

wetAt this same (very wet) location, I snapped a couple images of this purple-pink blooming milkweed, which I had identified previously as Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata). But take a look at the leaves, with the veins forming an almost right angle with the midrib. Newcomb keys this plant out as either Purple Milkweed (A. purpurascens) or Red Milkweed (A. rubra).

dryFurthermore, over by the observation tower, in the drier flat that is managed for meadow, milkweeds were in fuller bloom.

I need to go back and take a closer look at the underside of the leaves and the flowers. Milkweed flowers consists of a corona of five erect “hoods,” with a curved horn jutting from each hood. The size and configuration of hoods and horns is an ID key.

The species checklist prepared by the friends organization says that A. purpurascens is found in the park. Newcomb describes the habitat for A. purpurascens as “dry fields and thickets,” which is a better match for the meadow by the tower. Newcomb locates A. rubra in “wet pinelands and bogs,” which more closely describes the conditions at the north end of the wetland.

I hear that Paris is beautiful this time of the year

Nick Carbone reports:

Radio and television anchors in France are no longer allowed to use the names of the social networking sites [Twitter and Facebook] promotionally in their broadcasts.

(Link via The Morning News.)

And double annoyance points: time.com pulls a version of the hacky trick that the Washington Examiner uses: it forces the browser to append a “read more” promotional link to the copy-paste buffer that you’re using to assemble a pull quote. No doubt the party line is “Most of our users like the convenience of…”

The slow season

Manhola Dargis responds to fellow Times columnnist Dan Kois:

…The Hangover Part II, which I find boring, raked in $137.4 million over the five-day Memorial Day weekend. It’s the kind of boring that makes money, partly because it’s the boring that many people like, want to like, insist on liking or are just used to, and partly because it’s the sort of aggressively packaged boring you can’t escape, having opened on an estimated 17 percent of American screens. Filled with gags and characters recycled from the first Hangover, the sequel is grindingly repetitive and features scene after similar scene of characters staring at one another stupidly, flailing about wildly and asking what happened. This is the boring that Andy Warhol, who liked boring, found, well, boring.

I like it

Already widely linked, and even parodied, Jonathan Franzen’s op ed piece, adapted from a commencement address, is still highly linkable. Franzen’s like/love distinction reminds me of another excellent piece from the Times, Russell Baker’s “Why Being Serious Is Hard.” (My clipping of Baker’s column has, alas, gone missing.) Baker made a similar distinction between passionate commitment to something, even to the point of looking silly (“being serious”), and merely going along with the flow (“being solemn”).

Sage decoded

Robert Sage, in his contribution to the Joyce symposium Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, looks at the prosody of this passage from what would become Finnegans Wake:

She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then, sauntering, by silvamoonlake and he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for whose sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees (peats be with them!) used to rustle that time down by the dykes of killing Kildare, for forstfellfoss with a plash across her. (Book I, chapter 8, known as “The Washers at the Ford”, p. 202 in the Viking edition)

Here’s part of Sage’s analysis:

Then comes the stronger three-syllable word sauntering, indicating development (adolescence) and leading by a short beat to the epitritus silvamoonlake, signifying full growth (maturity), the further associations with the latter stage being sylvan and the silver moon reflected in the lake. (p. 168)

So I marked epitritus in the margin, and when I got home started tracking it down. An internet search founders on the various inflections of the four-to-three ratio and a genus of ants. Randel’s Harvard Dictionary of Music offers, “A sesquitertian ratio, e.g., 4:3, which characterizes the interval of a perfect fourth.” Not what I had in mind. So let’s hit Webster II. Nothing under epitritus, but epitrite is glossed as: “A foot consisting of three long and one short syllables;—so called from being compounded of a spondee (which contains 4 times, or morae) with an iamb or a trochee (which contain 3 times). It is called 1st, 2d, 3d, or 4th epitrite according as the short syllable stands 1st, 2d, etc.”

I think that Sage heard the second syllable of silvamoonlake as the unstressed one, making this a second epitrite, but it’s a close call. To me, the four syllables sound almost equally stressed.

Not a moment too soon

Metro is considering a return to sanity, and by sanity I mean at least following its own guidelines for station names, as Kytja Weir reports. A naming policy review is planned for this week.

Some 15 of the 86 existing stations violate the 19-character limit, Metro says, and seven of those have more than one hyphen or slash mark separating the names.

Transfer stations have an even higher violation rate: three of the eight hubs exceed the 13-character limit.

The problem was highlighted last week when the blog Greater Greater Washington sponsored a fantasy map contest, asking its readers to submit redesigns of the existing Metro map. Of the 17 submissions, some maps struggled to fit the long names on their designs — and left off some stations altogether.

(Link via Washington Business Journal.)

(Washington Examiner web site team, your hack of the copy button is not unnoticed.)

Silver Line progress report: 18

two levelsThe teal-blue frame of the elevator shaft is visible rising above the mezzanine level of the future station for Wiehle Avenue. Concrete station walls have been poured, with the surface finished in Metro’s signature rough board-and-batten pattern.

With the closure of the Reston East park and ride lot, I have to be more creative in finding places to park so that I can stop and take these shots.

Good for something

Dr. Caren Cooper is collecting data on variation in House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) eggs.

Because House Sparrows are a nonnative species, they are undesirable inhabitants of nest boxes in North America, but they are an easily accessible study species that can be used to address ecological questions without disturbing native birds.

Researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are studying this species to help better understand the enormous variation in eggshell patterns and color. House Sparrow eggs exhibit an extraordinary amount of variation. Eggshell coloration and pattern may vary with available calcium, sunlight patterns, or habitat quality, and are expected to differ seasonally and geographically as well.

NestWatch participants are encouraged to submit digital photographs of eggs to Dr. Cooper, together with sufficient information to make scientific comparisons. Follow the link for more details.

Sugarloaf wildflowers

After a misty start, the weather proved especially cooperative for our final field trip for spring wildflower ID. Would that my point and shoot had done the same. I made suitable images neither of a darling yellow flower of the amaryllis or lily families, Yellow Stargrass (Hypoxis hirsuta), nor of the delicate Canada Mayflower (Maianthemum canadense), another lily.

Along Mt. Ephraim Road, where it crosses Bear Branch, to the west of the Sugarloaf Mountain summit, we compared the wiry stem of Indian Cucumber Root (Medeola virginiana) (yet another lily) to the fleshy stem of the pogonias, in this case Large Whorled Pogonia (Isotria verticillata) (an orchis family member). We also found some lingering fruits of Partidgeberry (Mitchella repens) along with this year’s tiny red flower buds in pairs. Coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara), looking like a dandelion as the flower is opening, is easy to distinguish from its fellow Composite when you see the somewhat hoof-shaped leaf.

don't insult itThe bottomland along the stream turned out to be a bonanza for non-spermatophytes, with at least five ferns in evidence. These are early fronds of Sensitive Fern (Onoclea sensibilis), so named because it dies back after the first frost.

neighAnd as an added bonus, a completely different division of the vascular plants: Equisetophyta, the horsetails. This drift of plants, per one general guide, is Field Horsetail (Equisetum arvense).

We then took a quick drive and climb to the summit, finding hawkweed along the roadside and blueberries as we mounted the stairs. Up top, there are a few tiny patches of Pink Lady’s Slipper (Cypripedium acaule)—I think I prefer Moccasin Flower for its common name. Also some nonreproducing American Chestnut trees (Castanea dentata). We went in search of Checkerberry but only found a group of five-plus Mourning Cloak butterflies (Nymphalis antiopa).

blackjackAlso scratching out a living on the summit, along with the Table Mountain Pine, is the leather-leaved Blackjack Oak (Quercus marilandica).

Threaded

As I was saying: we have come/ (or are we still going?) to a/ point where it is necessary to/ speak at cross purposes with what/ we are saying. It is because what-/ ever we were saying so failed to/ hit the mark. Now at last we know that/ saying one thing requires saying/ the opposite in order to keep the/ whole statement from being like/ a Hollywood set. Perhaps it would/ be better to be silent, but a) someone/ else would be speaking; and b) it/ wouldn’t keep us from going and we/ would continue doing what we/ are doing.

—John Cage, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” (1961), collected in Silence