Cork trees live for about 250 years, growing in open groves interspersed with meadows of tawny grasses and diverse wildflowers. Once a decade, skilled workers with hatchets carefully slice off an inch-thick jacket of bark, leaving the tree to grow it back. There are cork farmers right now slicing cork from the same trees that their great, great, great grandparents harvested. In all, some 13 billion corks are produced each year, slightly more than half of them in Portugal and the rest in Spain, France, Italy, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. It’s a $2 billion industry.

The skilled labor pays well, and the farmers can also keep livestock on the land. While they’re at it, the farmers keep a delicate balance in their forests, avoiding overgrazing but keeping shrubs from taking over, setting controlled fires and putting out fierce ones.

Among conservationists there’s a real fear that as cork prices fall, the cork oak forests will deteriorate or be converted into eucalyptus plantations or Mediterranean resorts.

Mind you, the practice or lack thereof doesn’t explain why all our scripts of August: Osage County from Dramatists have fallen apart.

ᔥ NYPL Wire

Despite the problems with the Net Promoter and Number of Recommendations metrics, Morgan and Rego (2006) have provided valuable insight regarding the relationship between business performance and other commonly used customer metrics…. We are unaware of another longitudinal study that examines the predictive value of satisfaction and loyalty metrics in such a comprehensive way.

And five years after the publication of The Ultimate Question, I’m waiting to see independent research that backs up its claims.

The entire talented ensemble replicates the bond of a family and they move around each other with a familiarity borne of generations of bloodline. …[Technical elements are] so ordinary and banal as to reinforce the idea that we really are all spying on the neighbors…

We had the place nearly to ourselves. For a Coastal Plain site, the walking is remarkably hilly.

It was a middling day for birds. We watched a Green Heron stalking its lunch on Parkers Creek; had good looks at Prothonotary Warbler, Scarlet Tanager, and Northern Parula; heard Ovenbird (frequently), Wood Thrush, Hooded Warbler, Worm-eating Warbler, White-eyed Vireo.

At the lunch break, a skink mistook Ethan’s trousers for an extension of the log he was sitting on.

Some nice butterflies: Spicebush Swallowtail, several Zebra Swallowtails, and two Vanessa species, an American Lady and numerous Red Admirals.

Some good flowering plants to look at: the place is covered with Virginia Waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum). Stephanie explained an concept that I hadn’t latched onto before, the difference between a determinate inflorescence (the plant decides how many florets to make and it’s done) and an indeterminate inflorescence (flower ’til you drop, like we saw with Mysotis).

And some great ferns. The image of Ebony Spleenwort (Asplenium platyneuron) at the left is an attempt to show the dark brown rachis. New York Fern (Thelypteris noveboracensis), at the right, tapers to a point at both ends, like a New Yorker burning his candle. Hay-scented Fern is the other species in our area that forms large clonal colonies like New York Fern.

Stephanie made the call on this Netted Chain Fern (Woodwardia areolata), which is very similar in appearance to Senstive Fern. I need to learn to look for fertile fronds when I’m looking at ferns.

Fishyback service is named by analogy with piggyback service, and consists of carrying loaded truck trailers on boats or barges. The top search results that aren’t definitions are newspaper clippings from the 1950s—and the textbooks where I read about it in the first place. Perhaps the transportation scheme was pushed aside in favor of the containerized shipping that we know today. I did find an Egyptian shipping company that advertises the service.

Birdyback intermodal transportation is the same idea, but with the trailer carried by a cargo plane. Presumably in the cargo hold, not Space Shuttle-style.

ᔥ Languagehat