Author: David Gorsline

At the park: 93

Monitoring of nest boxes for Wood Duck and Hooded Merganser has commenced at Huntley Meadows. We had planned to get started on 25 February, but we were rained out. From my first report:

As I expected, we already have nests started in the boxes. What I didn’t expect was that we have FIVE nests started, 4 Hooded Merganser and 1 Wood Duck. First out of the gate was the merg hen in box #67, already with 10 eggs.

Paul reported that box #13 may need some additional (unspecified) maintenance….

Interesting birds of the day included a Northern Harrier and one of our new regulars, Red-headed Woodpecker.

Familiar

Danai Gurira’s engaging drama takes a new angle on the ever-intriguing clash of cultures. In this play, Donald (avuncular Kim Sullivan) and Marvelous (stick-straight Inga Ballard), émigrés from Zimbabwe and now naturalized American citizens living in Minnesota, are preparing for the marriage of their older daughter Tendi to Chris, an evangelical Christian. When Tendi and her sister Nyasha seek to introduce African cultural elements into a conventional Protestant ceremony, sparks fly. The sparks catch fire at the arrival of the young women’s aunt Anne (force of nature Cheryl Lynn Bruce). Everyone in this tangle is working from a base of good intentions, and yet feelings get smashed and promises broken.

The end of the first act is forced, depending as it does on unrealistic behavior on the part of Nyasha (flexible company member Shannon Dorsey) and some too-fast thinking by Chris’s best man and brother, dim bulb Brad (Andy Truschinski). However, it does set up a winning comic scene between the two at the top of the second act.

The characters’ speech rhythms are quite interesting, from Marvelous’ triple “Anyway, anyway, anyway” as a means to blow off frustration (repeated by her daughter later in the play) to Anne’s grunts and an expression of dismay, a bit of Shona that sounds like “my way.”

  • Familiar, by Danai Gurira, directed by Adam Immerwahr, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Cheverly parks

Sunday afternoon, I crossed over to the east side of the city to walk, bird, and botanize with Matt Salo in two parks in Cheverly, Md.: the Nature Park and the wilder bits of Cheverly-Euclid Neighborhood Park. The Nature Park, located at the highest point in Cheverly, is notable for populations of Chestnut Oak (Quercus montana) and Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia). This location might be home to the nearest patches of Mountain Laurel to the District line.

starletThere wasn’t too much happening with the birds, but we did turn up some earthstars (likely Geastrium triplex) near a patch of moss.

Cheverly’s bedrock is the Potomac Group from the lower Cretaceous, sand-gravel and silt-clay units. Nevertheless, I am surprised by the sometimes steep topography of this area. It doesn’t feel like we’re on the Coastal Plain at all.

The Euclid park doesn’t have organized trails, just deer trails and social trails. Matt and a group of volunteers are managing a clearing for native grasses and Liatris pilosa. We glimpsed a Bald Eagle in the air, and heard at last one Barred Owl.

Deck

Washington’s National Theatre may have converted its rigging system from hemp ropes and sandbags to lines and counterweights, but there remain a few houses (and eight of them on Broadway) that use the nautical system, as Lisa Lacroce Patterson reports.

While hemp houses have deep stages, they cannot hang as many set pieces as theatres with modern counterweight systems because, since the bulky sandbags require a lot more space, those theatres have fewer “line sets” from which to hang. A counterweight system might have a line set every 6 to 8 inches, but a sandbag system requires more than double the amount of space between rope sets. At the State [Theatre New Brunswick, New Jersey], if a tour comes in with four or more 53-foot trucks, often less than half of the scenery can make it onto the stage because of the limited number of line sets.

Some links: 83

Some links, Wild Card Edition:

  • Andrea Appleton’s report: Chris Swan uses vacant lots in Baltimore (there are 14,000 at present) as experimental ecology plots.
  • Callan Bentley road tests a tool for teaching his geology students what went on in the mid-Atlantic: a worksheet matrix that brings together the What (e.g. Culpeper Basin), the When (e.g., Taconian orogeny), and the Why (evidence, to be filled in by the student).
  • Like Ducks? Thank a Hunter, by Wes Siler.

    There are 47 million birdwatchers in the U.S., but only 2.6 million waterfowl hunters. Conservation of wetlands falls disproportionately on the shoulders of hunters. And that’s a problem because hunter participation is decreasing. With fewer hunters, who’s going to pay for wildlife conservation?

Some links: 82

Some links, Creepy Parasite Edition:

  • Dodder (Cuscuta sp.), a twining plant parasite, can inject bits of microRNA into its hosts, blocking gene-based plant defense mechanisms. Summary of new research by Saima Shahid et al. at Phys.org.
  • We’re understanding more about how the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis takes over the behavior, if not the mind, of its ant hosts, as Ed Yong reports.

    Once an infection is underway, he says, the neurons in the ant’s body—the ones that give its brain control over its muscles—start to die. [David] Hughes [at Penn State] suspects that the fungus takes over. It effectively cuts the ant’s limbs off from its brain and inserts itself in place, releasing chemicals that force the muscles there to contract. If this is right, then the ant ends its life as a prisoner in its own body. Its brain is still in the driver’s seat, but the fungus has the wheel.

Some links: 81

Some links, Coffee and Birds Edition:

  • Jodi Helmer reports on the nascent coffee industry in California. Even in this non-tropical climate, at least one farmer is going the shade-grown route:

    Andy Mullins of Mullins Family Farm in Temecula… planted 1,000 coffee trees under the canopies of the avocado trees on his 4-acre farm.

  • A study from India by Charlotte H. Chang et al. indicates that coffee plantations given over to robusta supported nearly the same level of biodiversity as arabica farms, as summarized by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

On deck: 18

too muchOof! Too much indulgence at Powell’s, the giveaway shelf at work, and book exchange parties (with Vanessa and Anna, and now a Virginia edition hosted with Sally), and not enough reading! Oh, and pulling up Black Tickets (a recommendation by Janet when I lived in Minneapolis) from the downstairs shelves, in the expectation that I will either read it or swap it. Yet more books out of frame.