Category: In the Field

Our last field trip for Land Use Planning was a squlchy walk through the headwaters of Piney Branch in southwestern Montgomery County, as we looked at stormwater management structures there. Piney Branch is within one of several Special Protection Areas in the County. About ten years ago, Human Genome Sciences built a campus on land near Travillah and Darnestown Roads under conditions meant to ensure best practices for stormwater quality and quantity control.

Current thinking encourages more, smaller retention chambers, like this series of three. In the image at left, you’re looking at the last chamber, where (behind you) the outfall structures drain into the stream. The two upstream chambers are the depressions you see in the middle ground, this side of the road and lie of bare trees. In the image at right, you’re looking in the opposite direction, at the first of the chambers. The dark gunk is sediment and petroleum washed from the various impervious surfaces of the campus and settled into the sand at the bottom of the chamber. The white PVC tubes at upper right at test wells for checking groundwater levels.

A little farther along Shady Grove Road Extended is this chamber. The primary outfall is partially obscured by the dead Typha stalks, and it carries water to the stream in a small pipe (about 10 cm diameter). In the event of a major rain event, the large outfall structure at center left carries water away in a big pipe (30 cm or more). Most of these large outfall structures are notched so that a medium-sized inundation can be slowed down by the chamber. Also notice the retaining wall at right, which is holding up the graded fill so that offices and parking could be built on level ground, out of frame at right. The retaining wall is already showing some cracks and streaks.

Old-fashioned stormwater practices depended on in-stream dams that formed artificial ponds, like this one in a different development, part of the Universities at Shady Grove. At any rate, the three Ring-necked Ducks (Aythya collaris) that we saw were enjoying the water.

Despite management efforts, Piney Branch is not in the prime of health. Scouring of the banks is apparent in the image.

Nesting activity in seven of the boxes, as of this morning. We also spotted a pair of Spotted Turtles this morning, a species on the park’s target list.

We had a good complement of box-checkers this morning, so I spent most of my 90 minutes collecting trash from the area upstream of the main wetland. I gave some thought to leaving the dishpan, since it was flipped over and providing some habitat. I ran out of trash bags, so I had to leave some flotsam for next week.

Beavers have been active up and down the stream network. I was watching some sparrows, and then came across some female Red-winged Blackbirds, who looked huge by comparison. It’s only from a distance that you would confuse these birds with sparrows.

The mergansers continue their pattern of being unpredictably predictable. We found a nest already started on our first day of monitoring, but it wasn’t in the expected location; rather, we found four eggs in box #13, nearest the observation tower.

The work went a little quicker than past years, because now we have only fourteen boxes to check. After reviewing our records back to 2006, we had asked Dave Lawlor of the park staff to remove five boxes that haven’t been producing.

The weather was unusually pleasant for February, with clouds giving way to sun by mid-morning.

M.K. used a GPS to get latlongs of the boxes and produced a nifty map.

Red-winged Blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) are already chattering (seems early for them); the light frosting of red on the maples is barely perceptible at distance. On the way back to the cars, above the boardwalk I saw a big black bird riding a thermal, a bird with a flash of white. The rest of the team confirmed my guess (I’d left my bins at home): Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus).

A very late start, but good weather conditions, for my stroll along the (recently restored) Glade for the Great Backyard Bird Count. Fifteen species, including a briefly-heard Red-shouldered Hawk. The only slight surprise was a Common Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula). Bonus mammal for the walk (seen and smelled) was a very well-fed-looking fox.

How do we define where an urban space is, what its edges are, without making those edges into barriers? That is one of city planners’ problems that we explored in our first field trip for my land use principles class, led by our instructor Katherine Nelson through the Central Business District of Silver Spring, We were joined by Reemberto Rodríguez, Director of the Silver Spring Regional Center, who proved to be a government executive blessed with equal parts of pragmatism, sardonic wit, and visionary enthusiasm. For Rodríguez, Silver Spring in all its diversity “is America”—nay, it is “the center of the universe.”

Silver Spring’s CBD, designated by the state as an arts and entertainment district, has seen a massive amount of redevelopment in the past decade, and for the most part that redevelopment has been successful. But there are many projects in the planners’ books that are still empty lots, like this block scheduled for high-density housing just north of the new civic building at Veterans Plaza. The gradual relocation of light industrial businesses and low-density in the Fenton Village and Ripley districts, to be replaced with intensive development with FARs around 4, is also yet to come.

Preservation of Silver Spring’s historic heritage, in whole or metonymically, was another theme of our walk. While the entire Silver Spring post office and a (currently rundown) tile-roofed building that was the birthplace of dry cleaning are protected complete, it is only the facades of the Silver Spring Shopping Center and Canada Dry bottling plant that have been retained.

Pathways (narrow and broad) and open space are always fruitful topics of analysis when it comes to a place like downtown Silver Spring, situated as it is at the conjunction of three major arterials (Maryland 410, East-West Highway; U.S. 29, Colesville Road; and Maryland 97, Georgia Avenue), a passenger and freight rail line, Metro’s Red Line, and the future light-rail Purple Line. We looked at mandated public use spaces that worked, like a sliver of land attached to a condo block on Fenton Street (occupied by two residents even on this blustery cold February day), and a gateway space for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and those that were less successful, like the fenced and gated garden at Discovery Communications. I’ve walked that block of Wayne Avenue many times and I wasn’t aware that the space in front of the building was open to the public.

Honest-to-Fox green space, at present, is mostly pushed to the margins of the CBD, like Jesup Blair Park and this forlorn bit of space along Fenton Street. Jesup Blair was deserted on this unfriendly Saturday, but the soccer fields showed evidence of heavy use.

Katherine led us down down several alleys along the walk, cutting across the twisted grain of the street grid, where the strong diagonals of the District line and railroad contend with the natural inclination of north-to-south. Numerous signs directed us to nearby bike paths that didn’t quite penetrate the CBD’s core. We looked at the edge-and-barrier problem along Cedar Street, where single-family homes are converted by special exception to light office uses like lawyers and clinics, and cut-through vehicle traffic is inhibited by turn restrictions.

Both Katherine and Reemberto pointed out the strength of small design details and amenities: a newly-built sidewalk bulb-out at Georgia and Bonifant, the banners (for money reasons, no longer maintained) that once identified the district, some distinctive brick and metalwork along Fenton Street. I noticed the mosaic and mural Silver Pass, a valiant effort to dress up the pedestrian underpass (all right, tunnel) that carries walkers along Georgia Avenue under the rail tracks.

And along East-West Highway, we even found, in a somewhat shabby state, the original Silver Spring. Not to mention the cryptically named Roger Miller Restaurant.

I came away from the field trip, a visit to an area that I thought I knew well, with a generous handful of places to come back and explore fully: the scrappy new Bonifant Theatre Space, the historical society in the original train depot, jazz at Vicino, the shiny performing arts venue at Montgomery College, Silver Spring Books (also on Bonifant).

The Eastern Hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) are hanging on, just barely, in Hemlock Overlook Regional Park. I took a quick loop around this park, which lies on the Fairfax County side of Bull Run.

A fairly quiet walk, save for the unsettling sound of gunfire somewhere to the south and (we hope) outside the park boundary. The ground is frozen hard, which turned out to be helpful for a couple of gullied-out stream crossings. A Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) looped over the county line from the other side of the stream, then flew back. I was a little surprised by the several Belted Kingfishers (Ceryle alcyon) that are making a winter of it along the watercourse. At midday, as I returned to the car, some tangled brush next to the parking area proved to be rather birdy, turning up a wren and a junco or two.

I followed, more or less, the loop described as hike #14 in PATC’s Hikes in the Washington Region, part B. My edition (third) is dated 1993, and a few of the trails have been relocated since then. There’s a section that’s rather built up, as it’s set aside for youth camps: there are ropes courses and such.

The street name signs in the nearby Town of Clifton, the municipality of quadrangular border, are simple and effective.

Bands of showers, clouds, and a little sunshine passed over us on Sugarloaf Mountain, on an ANS hike led by Cathy Stragar. Birding on the trail was slow—shreds of mixed winter songbird flocks, a few winter woodpeckers—although a Common Raven (Corvus corax) did oblige by flying overhead and vocalizing. But generally we were able to enjoy the quiet, punctuated from time to time by the patter of some light rain.

Tree life on the mountain is dominated by Chestnut Oak (Quercus montana); there are numerous stands of Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia) filling in the understory. I found a couple sprigs of Spotted Wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata), and Cathy pointed out the first spikes of Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) emerging from a wet spot.

Cathy set a fairly brisk pace, so we covered the five and half miles of the blue loop trail plus side trip to the summit in 5:15.

This view to the west from the summit is a perspective maintainer, with the gentle curve of the Potomac River offset by the stacks of the coal-fired generating station at Dickerson. Wii juice has gotta come from somewhere.

After I snapped the landscape, I found one of the survey monuments for the peak at my feet. (Here’s a shinier image of what they look like.)

Lots of botanizing on these various trips, but I did pick up two life birds in the field this year.

• Tree identification in the Four Mile Run watershed, Arlington County, Va.; Carderock Recreation Area, Montgomery County, Md.; and Sky Meadows SP, Fauquier County, Va.
• Monocacy River NRMA, Frederick County, Md.
• Fairfax Cross County Trail, Va.
• Greater Deanwood Heritage Trail, Washington
• Piscataway Park, Prince George’s County, Md.
• Mushrooming at Woodend Sanctuary, Chevy Chase, Montgomery County, Md.; Little Paint Branch Park, Prince George’s County, Md.; Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary, Anne Arundel County, Md.
• Little Bennett Regional Park, Montgomery County, Md.
• Providence, R. I., and vicinity
• in the clouds
• Baltimore harbor
• Huntley Meadows Park, Fairfax County, Va.

2009’s list. 2008’s list.

I was clearing out some old files, and came across this species list in a Friends newsletter from a couple of years ago. It’s a checklist of target species that Huntley Meadows Park staff are seeking to manage for. Hence the hemi-marsh restoration project. Observers are encouraged to make note of these species in the park’s logbooks. Largely for my own reference, the list(s):

• April-July
  • Yellow-crowned Night-Heron (Nyctanassa violacea)
  • American Bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus)
  • Least Bittern (Ixobrychus exilis)
  • Virginia Rail (Rallus limicola)
  • King Rail (R. elegans)
  • Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus)
  • Pied-billed Grebe (Podilymbus podiceps)
  • American Black Duck (Anas rubripes)
  • Spotted Turtle (Clemmys guttata)
  • Green Treefrog (Hyla cinerea)
• October-March
  • American Black Duck (Anas rubripes)
  • Green-winged Teal (A. crecca)
  • Blue-winged Teal (A. discors)
  • Gadwall (A. strepera)
  • Northern Pintail (A. acuta)
  • American Wigeon (A. americana)
  • Northern Shoveler (A. clypeata)

Yesterday, Huntley Meadows Park manager Kevin Munroe, along with staffer Elena Ryan, gave a recap of plans for restoration of the park’s central wetland. Much has changed and much has stayed the same since plans were discussed in public meetings in 2007. Since then, the commonwealth has okayed the dam design as meeting “special low hazard” criteria, reflecting projections that the impact downstream of a failed dam during a 100-year storm would be no worse than if the dam weren’t there at all. However, the county’s Department of Public Works and Environmental Services insists on a 600-foot wide spillway to the north of the dam, to mitigate the potential of the earthen structure being overtopped. Such a spillway would stretch most of the way from the observation tower to the hike-bike trail.

So Kevin and his team are (somewhat reluctantly) considering a concrete structure instead, which would provide its own spillway. They’re looking at designs and facings that would temper the aesthetic intrusion of an obviously man-made structure. Kevin showed one slide of a dam at the Patuxent reserve that looks not unattractive, to my eye.

Plans to remove and replant have also been shelved, along with dredging and construction pools. As Kevin put it, the intention is to use water levels to manage the plant life.

Elena Ryan has been looking at the relationship between rainfall and water levels in the wetland. She’s got two years of observations from a water level gauge positioned off the boardwalk on the near side of the tower. Her regression analysis tells her that for every inch of rainfall, water levels in the wetland rise 3.25 inches over the course of three days.

Kevin recapped the purpose of the restoration project with the following elevator speech (paraphrased by me): Beaver marshes move through stages of succession; one of these, the hemi-marsh, shows the highest level of biodiversity; because both biodiversity and marshlands are in decline, the Park Authority and Huntley Meadows community are working to manage the wetland to hemi-marsh conditions.

This summary introduces a term of wetland ecology new to me: the hemi-marsh. A hemi-marsh (also known as low-water marsh) is characterized as a 50-50 mix of open water and emergent vegetation. However, it’s a relatively unstable condition. Since mid-century or so, the park’s wetland has been oscillating between wetter lake marsh/high-water marsh conditions (at the extreme, a eutrophic lake), and drier wet meadow/dry marsh conditions.

Hemi-marsh conditions favor certain bird species of concern in our region, among them Least Bittern (Ixobrychus exilis), Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus), Pied-billed Grebe (Podilymbus podiceps), and King Rail (Rallus elegans), considered an indicator species for hemi-marsh.

After talks, we took a brief walk with Kevin in the park as late afternoon came on. Ice has begun to skim the water edges. My fingers and toes haven’t developed their winter anti-freeze yet. Northern Shovelers (Anas clypeata) and Green-winged Teal (A. crecca) have moved in for the season; most of the male shovelers are out of their eclipse plumage and are dressed for breeding already. An American Beaver (Castor canadensis) seemed more interested in his crepuscular meal than in our small party.

I scrambled out of bed early to get a couple of images of the evaporation fog over Lake Thoreau, as part of my meteorology class project. And since the lake is almost always a good photographic subject, I snapped a few more of the rising sun’s line across the treetops to the west.

Our field trip for Dan Ferandez’s weather and climate class visited the Baltimore harbor by means of the pungy schooner Lady Maryland. Instructors/crew from the Living Classrooms Foundation cast a (educationally-permitted) trawl net, with a little help from us participants.

Then, as the boat tracked to and fro in sight of Fort McHenry, we examined the fauna that we’d brought up in the net. Some fish (not Rockfish, despite my overeager and uninformed ID, but rather Yellow Perch [Perca flavescens] and Spot Croaker [Leiostomus xanthurus]) that favor the brackish water of the estuary, and a couple of comb jellies (not visible in the image, but in the adjacent bucket).

A wee Blue Crab (Callinectes sapidus), as well as a full-grown one that had joined the choir eternal. And, of course, plastic rubbish, which at least was serving as substrate for some sea anemones.

For me, one takeaway was a reminder from the educators that partially full bottles of drinking water in a landfill isolate that resource from the hydrologic cycle. If you see a bottle of water that’s otherwise going to be trashed (rather than recycled), the least you can do is empty the bottle so that the water can return to the sea.

Any trip to the Baltimore harbor has to include a shot of the Domino Sugar plant. We see some thin bands of cumulus clouds trying to get themselves better organized. Leta tagged along so that she could loom over the Baltimore city skyline.

My term project for my meteorology class is fairly simple: photograph and identify as many cloud types as possible. And thus the curse of learning to be a naturalist is further heaped upon my head: it’s not enough that I can’t walk down the street or into the woods without asking myself what kind of trees I’m looking at, without stopping to look at an outcrop of bedrock, without craning to get a better view of what’s flying around. Now I have to gawp at the clouds in the sky.

I grabbed this image of some rumbly-looking cumulus clouds from the heights of the parking deck at West Falls Church metro. I’m still looking for a good shot of cumulonimbus—unlikely now that the summer thunderstorm season has passed.

Chip Clouse and Chuck Bell have the more authoritative rundown of Go Bird! Providence field trips: day two, day four.

Wednesday was pretty much a washout for birding. We did take a quick walk at the education center of the Audubon Society of Rhode Island in between rain showers. (I also visited a Massachusetts Audubon sanctuary on Friday–these independent Audubons in New England have some very impressive facilities.)

Finally, Thursday brought clearing weather and a field trip to Block Island, the intended centerpiece of the conference. The original plan was that we would divide into two groups and bird the island on successive days, without an end-of-day deadline since we had no scheduled dinners Monday through Wednesday. Birding as one large group on Thursday, with a closing dinner scheduled at the end of the day, had conference organizers scrambling. It worked out fairly well, although at times there was a lot of milling about, waiting for a van, and wondering where the trip leaders had gone off to.

Seas were still running about 4-6 feet (my guess) on the morning crossing. Those of us on the top deck were appraised of this fact when we were nailed by a big wave breaking over the starboard bow just as the ferry reached the Point Judith breakwater.

We started near the northern tip of the island, just in sight of the lighthouse. The scrubby woods in this area turned up a few warblers. I saw a yellow-black-and-white Dendroica warbler that otherwise must remain a mystery.

In the afternoon we moved on to Nathan Mott Park, also known as “the enchanted forest.” Birding there was fairly slow, the trail was an out-and-back, and our van was waiting for us at 2:15, so we did not linger. Instead, I looked at this nice Arrowwood Viburnum (Viburnum dentatum) in fruit.

The departure and return were sunny and smooth. Most everyone got good looks at Lesser Black-backed Gull (Larus fuscus) (including side-by-side comparisons to L. marinus) on the beach near the ferry landing. The shearwaters did not make an appearance.

My species count for the Rhode Island part of this trip comes in at about 70. I believe the combined group checklists came in somewhere in the 130’s.

This trip reminded me how much I enjoy birding and just generally hanging out oceanside. I still love the mountains, but the sea pulls me, too. Susan and I visited the Outer Banks of North Carolina in 1993, and that trip got me hooked on birding for good–and hooked on getting whipped by the wind on a rocky beach, scanning the horizon for gannets.