theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Goats and Soda, NPR’s plucky little blog that rarely has an audio component and hence can’t be monetized, remembers five inspiring women who went on ahead in 2022.
This is the sort of pure digital work that I fear we (NPR) won’t be able to afford in the current economic situation.
I didn’t make much time to write commentary on newer books this year. Faves:
Farmers and town-dwellers cope with the collapse of California’s water supply in the Westlands Water District. Great longer form reporting by Dan Charles.
I love everything about this image from Shorpy (save one): the motion blur of the waitresses and ceiling fan, obscure prepackaged food, checkerboarded mini tile floor, shiny Coca-Cola fountain—and above all, the patrons ranked behind the diners, waiting their turn. The blot: as commenters have noted, this image is from 1942, when Washington was segregated. The photo is by Marjory Collins for the Farm Security Administration.
Birthday road trip and Virginia Master Naturalists conference.
Overnight stays in 2022:
I’m chasing that next Trail Quest pin.
Another moderately successful season of monitoring nest boxes at Huntley Meadows Park, Fairfax County, Va.
This was my second year leading Seneca’s sector 14, and I was a last-minute recruit to lead a subsector of Central Loudoun’s sector 11, four sites in the vicinity of “Old Ashburn” (the crossroads with the W&OD Trail).
We found a warm place inside to get the sector 14 group organized and then dispersed into a pair of parties. We missed some birds that we found last year, but found new ones, for a total of 46 species. One of my feeder watchers reported an Evening Grosbeak (Hesperiphona vespertina). The Buttermilk Creek Trail (pinned as an eBird hotspot) was marginally productive for Candy and Pat’s party; on the other hand, I had reasonable success with the obscure Lexington Estates Park in Great Falls, despite a bumptious family group passing through. No luck finding Rock Pigeon in my sector, despite some near-twilight parking lot crawling. The north end of Lake Fairfax is more easily accessible from the boat house, rather than walking down the hill from the parking by the water park.
I got to meet some new places and denizens of Ashburn with sector leader Kent Clizbe, and my team of five “beginners” was relatively well experienced. A Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) teed up for us near the Graves Lane pond. Accipiters are still an ID challenge for me. Raptor-on-raptor confrontations are always fun: this time it was another Red-shouldered Hawk challenging a Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), flustering a pack of European Starlings in the process. The Borrowers claimed the lens hood on my long lens, and then quickly returned it (thanks, Michael!).
It was a good season for Eastern Bluebirds (Sialia sialis) on both counts.
I’ll make this brief:
With the demise of the bird site, I will probably return to more quick linkblogging here.
The first sentence (more or less) of the first post for the last twelve months:
The year in review:
Looking for somewhere to spend that Hanukkah gelt (yes, I know, but just imagine)?
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 2022.
Jenny Odell explains why I kept scrolling through the bird site, like a laboratory pigeon hitting the lever to get a food pellet, even when every fifth pellet was an ad and most of the others were repeats.
Entrainment, a term that originated in biology and then spread to the social sciences, refers to the alignment of an organism’s physiology or behavior with a cycle; the most familiar example would be our circadian rhythm. The signal driving entrainment, in this case light and dark, is called a “zeitgeber” (German for “time giver”)….
Something like entrainment seems to be at work in our relationship to Twitter and other forms of social media. The rate of updates and notifications provides a powerful zeitgeber — one that can even override our circadian rhythm, as any nighttime scroller knows.
Andy Brunning presents an infographic of the Mohs Hardness Scale, something I learned about when I was a squirt and received a student’s geology kit and have subsequently forgotten about. But behind that tidy 0-to-10 scale is a dirty little secret:
There’s no fixed value of hardness between the different numbers in the scale — in fact, diamond at 10 is several times harder than corundum at 9, but corundum is only around twice as hard as topaz at 8.
More publicity for the Habenaria repens that we documented in September. News of the observation was reported in Florascope, newsletter of the Flora of Virginia Project. The species is now recorded in the Digital Atlas of the Virginia Flora, and will be added to the next digital update of the Flora of Virginia.
Discovered new to Virginia in September 2022 during a Master Naturalist field trip in the Great Dismal Swamp. The sighting was posted on iNaturalist as an unknown orchid, but soon identified from the photos by a Virginia Natural Heritage Program biologist. A subsequent field survey by Natural Heritage biologists revealed about 25 reproductive plants, dozens of smaller plants, and hundreds of tiny seedlings at the site.