Author: David Gorsline

People’s

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.

My year in cities, 2022

Birthday road trip and Virginia Master Naturalists conference.

Overnight stays in 2022:

My year in hikes and field trips, 2022

I’m chasing that next Trail Quest pin.

Another moderately successful season of monitoring nest boxes at Huntley Meadows Park, Fairfax County, Va.

Christmas Bird Count 2022: Seneca and Central Loudoun

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.

The year in review, 2022

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:

  • 15 January: What Will Art Look Like in the Metaverse?, by Dean Kissick.
  • 20 February: Noreen Malone captures the mood of the moment.
  • 4 March: Finally, after a dark and cold winter, some color in my Winogradsky column project.
  • 1 April: Hi, Mom!
  • 3 May: Sunday’s report: Many adventures today!
  • 4 June: Back in the field with the scrappy little Mason & Bailey Club, and their first visit to Huntley Meadows Park!
  • 4 July: As usual, that’s me in the back, the last one to get on whatever we’re looking at.
  • 6 August: [[User:Adam_Cuerden]] gives a quick backstage tour.
  • 6 September: “(Maybe that’s what you’re seeing whenever you see a little swirling updraft of debris in the city: someone’s panic taking shape, someone’s death setting out to find their body.)”
  • 1 October: Helen Shaw reviews David Greenspan’s realization of Four Saints in Three Acts, by Gertrude Stein.
  • 1 November: I have become mildly obsessed with Mantovani’s anodyne arrangement of “Charmaine,” perhaps the epitome of easy listening/elevator music.
  • 6 December: More publicity for the Habenaria repens that we documented in September.

The year in review:

My year in contributions, 2022

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.

Time shift

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.

Wherein my illusions are dashed

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.

Some ink: 15

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.

Installation

Jennifer Tipton at the light board for a show of her own making:

When computer controls came in, for example, she was surprised by how much she liked them.

“You can program cues with a liquid movement you could never have with human beings pushing levers and knobs,” she said. “Before the computer, I can’t remember a cue that lasted more than 30 seconds, but now you can have something happening across the full hour of a program. I thought I would miss the ability to call cues in the way I was taught — vocally, you can speed it up and slow it down — but I was thrilled that it happened the same way every time.”

New equipment can alter color and orientation automatically — so if she wants to change something, “you don’t have to stop the rehearsal and have a guy get the ladder out and change it,” she said. But many of the new high-tech colors aren’t to her liking — “they aren’t full spectrum, like the sun” — and the fact that the manufacturers keep changing them makes it difficult to maintain the consistency of her designs for older works still in repertory.