Author: David Gorsline

Magee Marsh: 2

I spent about an hour on the Magee Marsh boardwalk (I took a long time working out a Palm Warbler [Setophaga palmarum] that for once was not bobbing its tail because it was busy preening, not foraging), and then I joined one of the informal walks that are part of the Biggest Week conference registration. Sarah Winnicki co-led a group down the Crane Creek Estuary Trail. I got another, better look and listen of the Warbling Vireos (Vireo gilvus) that are fairly regular here—an A- look, but good enough for a twitch. Even better was the look at a Gray-cheeked Thrush (Catharus minimus) skulking about along one of the dikes.

The winds picked up over the course of the morning—much more blustery than yesterday, but no crazy rainstorms in the afternoon.

furblyNo bird, plant, or habitat pictures, but this myxomycete at the entrance to the trail is quite nice.

stayedThe bridge that carries I-280 over the Maumee in Toledo is rather grand.

Green Creek

heading for the bayTom Kashmer and Katie Andersen led a canoe trip down the sleepy Green Creek to its mouth at Muddy Creek Bay. This body in turn flows with the Sandusky River into Sandusky Bay. At the start, we found it tricky to manage the boats (I haven’t been in a canoe since I was a kid at summer camp) and see any birds. But soon we were picking up warblers and tanagers and other songbirds that we hadn’t seen yesterday.

The target bird for this trip was Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), and it was a slam dunk. We found a good dozen-plus birds, both adults and immatures, in the lowest reaches of Green Creek and over Muddy Creek Bay. But the big pleasant surprise was a quick flyover of three Trumpeter Swans (Cygnus buccinator). I’ve probably seen this bird before, but I’ve never been confident of an ID. For that matter, I’d like to have had another look at the three we saw today.

postieI love these old marker posts. This one along U.S. 20 is dated 1842 on its top, so it’s from the time before Lower Sandusky was renamed Fremont. I interpret it as signing 26 miles to Lower Sandusky (to the southeast) and [2]5 miles to Perrysburg (to the northwest). Most of the paint has weathered away. The only problem with my reading is that Lower Sandusky/Fremont is much closer than 26 miles at this point.

Magee Marsh Wildlife Area

Very birdy.

That’s perhaps the only way to describe Magee Marsh in spring migration. I picked up two lifers, Bay-breasted Warbler (Dendroica castanea) and Tennesssee Warbler (Oreothlypis peregrina)—perhaps the only two that I will find this trip.

very popularMany eyes and ears make for easy spotting, but the bouncy boardwalk and throngs of birders make birding here a little like trying to get a seat on a Red Line train at 8:30 in the morning.

quieterThe lakefront, on the other side of the huge parking lot from the boardwalk, is much more my style.

I watched Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) picking insects off the ground to carry back to the nest. I saw multiple Yellow Warblers (D. petechia): if the sight of a bright Yellow Warbler doesn’t give you a little jolt of joy, you don’t really like birds. An iridescent Common Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula) foraged in the wet leaf litter (dishwasher downpours of rain yesterday), tossing leaves aside and cocking its gimlet-eyed head like a cop looking for your dope stash.

mascotIn the afternoon, I went to a slide-show workshop by Kenn Kaufman on flycatcher ID. The talk was held at the visitor center of Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, and who should be there in the lobby to greet me but Puddles the Blue Goose!

At the park: 77

From my most recent report:

So this past Sunday was a little rough. We have evidence of predation, probably by Raccoon, at 6 boxes, as well as evidence of visits to at least 2 other boxes. Of the 6 predated clutches, 2 were started since our last visit, in April. It’s hard to keep the species bookkeeping straight when you have only broken shells to work with. The predated boxes are in the southern half of those we monitor, from #13 to #61. The door to #67 was partly pulled off; we did a spot repair and M.K. plans to return to make a more permanent fix.

We happened upon Dave Lawlor on the trail, who said that he had recently ordered predator guard cones from Ducks Unlimited. If we can be of assistance installing the cones, please let us know.

On the upside: Kat and Chris found Box #2 in the process of hatching out. We have 4 clutches still in progress. And Paul and I got a look at the Virginia Rail that has been hanging out within the boardwalk loop.

Man of La Mancha

A strong production of this audience favorite, certainly a standard against which other productions can be judged.

The prison that Cervantes/Don Quixote finds himself suggests, somewhat anachronistically, an abandoned industrial facility, full of echoes; high above the relatively shallow playing space, a catwalk looms, from which a vertiginous stairway can be lowered. There is a substantial flywheel sort of thing: it’s useful as a means to subdue Aldonza during “The Abduction,” and it works well to suggest the windmill at which Don Quixote must tilt, but it otherwise seems to come from another time. A solid door in the floor always closes with an ominous bang.

Anthony Warlow does a fine job as the eponymous Knight of the Woeful Countenance. His reading of the play’s signature song, “The Impossible Dream,” builds from a quiet, half-spoken verse to a powerful climax. As Sancho Panza, Nehal Joshi is doe-eyed and slightly crazed, a character from a Disney cartoon who has tumbled into the direst of straits. Nice bit with the bench for “I Really Like Him.” The ensemble of muleteers provides much of the percussion that drives the Spanish-inflected score.

Sight lines and sound lines are often not the same. Listening from our row E seats, the amplified sound was occasionally murky, and sometimes those industrial echoes worked against telling the story.

  • Man of La Mancha, written by Dale Wasserman, music by Mitch Leigh, lyrics by Joe Darion, directed by Alan Paul, Shakespeare Theatre Company Sidney Harman Hall, Washington

Lights Rise on Grace

Chad Beckim’s economical three-hander tells the story of an unconventional love triangle among Grace, her husband Large, and the man he meets in prison, Riece. The play weaves together narrative monologue passages with deft ensemble scenes, with blade-sharp transitions between. It’s most enjoyable in an early scene from high school, where painfully shy Grace (the flexible Jeena Yi) first meets, goofy, affable Large (endearing DeLance Minefree).

It’s an actorly work—the players get to show off their chops—but one that’s less than engaging. The piece’s insistent mirrored structure, featuring pairs of completely different scenes played with almost identical dialog, comes off as excessively symmetrical. It touches on themes of race relations and the compromises we make to survive in challenging situations without going very deep.

  • Lights Rise on Grace, by Chad Beckim, directed by Michael John Garcés, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Some links: 72

Many conservation-oriented links piling up on my virtual desk, unremarked—so this needs must be a roundup post.

  • Sharman Apt Russell describes her experiences collecting phenology data for Nature’s Notebook.
  • Caren Cooper summarizes the findings in her recent paper in the Journal of Wildlife Management: birders and hunters alike are more likely to engage in conservation-supporting actitivies. Cooper’s “conservation superstars” are birders who are also hunters: these people are even more likely to donate money for conservation and do other things to preserve our legacy.
  • Jason Goldman sings the praises of shade-grown coffee from an unexpected part of the world: Ethiopia, the land where Coffea was first domesticated.
  • And Goldman summarizes a paper by A.M.I. Roberts et al., working with 222 years of phenology data collected by Robert Marsham and his descendants from the family estate in Norfolk, UK. For certain tree species, “winter chilling” turns out to be a more important factor determining leaf out than the warmth of “spring forcing.”

Bubble pudding

An excellent piece of investigative business reporting in this past Sunday’s Times from Mary Williams Walsh, concerning the creative accounting that many insurance companies have happened upon: “captive reinsurance” is a fancy name for hiding liabilities on a subsidiary’s balance sheet.

She uses the case of Accordia Life and Annuity, which allocated insurance liabilities to six subsidiary companies, capitalizing the subs with egregious mutual exchanges of IOUs. It’s not for nothing that one of the subs is named Tapioca View.

But the paradox of the story is that the state of Iowa (where Accordia is incorporated), which has the express goal of making Des Moines an insurance center, is also a leader in requiring transparency, thereby making it possible for journalists to expose the shaky dealings.

…before you blame Iowa for playing fast and loose with the legacy of [19th-century reformer] Elizur Wright, remember: Most states now allow captive reinsurance. So do the traditional offshore insurance havens like Bermuda. And most keep it secret. But Iowa has decided to stick its neck out and let people look at the deals, knowing full well that they might not like what they see.

At the park: 75

From my most recent report of the nest box team’s activities:

Lots of activity in the past two weeks! We have nests in 8 of the 16 boxes we are monitoring. We have often observed mixed clutches of Wood Duck and Hooded Merganser, but [we] found something new in box #60: two birds flushed from the box, one of each species. The box has a combined clutch of 14 eggs.

We expect box #67 to be hatched out by May. Box #6 did not show any change between the 29th and the 5th, so it’s possible that this nest has been abandoned. Continuing my run of dropping hardware into the wetland, box #7 needs a new quick link closure: I have some spares and I will take care of this next time.

I have new GPS coordinates for all the boxes, and I will be distributing that info.

We have several pictures of duck and merg eggs side by side for comparison, and I will get something distributed shortly.

thanks for the perchTree Swallows say thank you to box #84 for being such nice spot to perch up on. A Brown-headed Cowbird could be heard in the parking lot on the 29th. An Osprey was fishing in the main pond on the 5th.

* * *

That’s all for us for April. Our May work day will be the first Sunday, 3 May.

Flem Snopes

…a thick squat soft man of no establishable age between twenty and thirty, with a broad still face containing a tight seam of mouth stained slightly at the corners with tobacco, and eyes the color of stagnant water, and projecting from among the other features in startling and sudden paradox, a tiny predatory nose like the beak of a small hawk. It was as though the original nose had been left off by the original designer or craftsman and the unfinished job taken over by someone of a radically different school or perhaps by some viciously maniacal humorist or perhaps by one who had had only time to clap into the center of the face a frantic and desperate warning.

—William Faulkner, The Hamlet, Book One: Flem, Chapter Three, 1.

The Pigeoning

Frank works in a shabby office, with nothing but his own OCD and a rather talkative office safety manual for company. The expression on his face usually registers somewhere between bemusement and mild alarm. Frank is also a bunraku puppet and the protagonist of this 60-minute piece—a charming, often goofy, at times phantasmagorically frightening tale of one man’s obsession with common city pigeons and the secret messages they carry to us.

Writer/director Robin Frohardt always lets us know what Frank is thinking, which is rather a challenge because Frank is wordless (we do hear some expressively heavy sighs from him); a lot of the information about Frank’s emotional and cognitive states is the responsibility of composer Freddi Price. Doubling on laptop, Price’s sound effects are clean and crisp, and sometimes not quite what they seem.

There’s a lot of good straightforward puppetry here: a formidable trash monster, a hilarious set of venetian blinds with a mind of its own. Frohardt is not afraid to go a little meta, as well, as when Frank himself turns feckless puppeteer. But the core of this piece is Frank’s endearing personality (although I don’t think I’d want to share a break room with him), sometimes revealed by something as simple as the squeak of a highlighting pen.

  • The Pigeoning, created and directed by Robin Frohardt, composed by Freddi Price, Artisphere Dome Theatre, Arlington, Va.

This was my first (and very likely last) opportunity to visit Artisphere’s friendly Dome Theatre (the ceiling of which was used very creatively to register an underwater effect). Alas, the multivenue county-funded facility is slated to be closed later this year.