At the park: 55

Selected from this week’s report to park staff:

The beavers’ effect on local water levels is quite evident. While lower Barnyard Run used to be the reach of sketchy high water, the knee- and hip-deep stuff is now at the beginning of the boardwalk. Box #2 used to be located at the edge of the channel, and now it’s surrounded by water.

We had some ice to break through in the shallows around #1 and #3.

Box #1 is up to 12 Hooded Merganser eggs, so we would expect incubation to begin this week. Box #13 has a new nest with 3 HM eggs.

Dormant season feeders observed: 14 Green-winged Teal, 4 Northern Shoveler, 2 Gadwall

Water gauge: 0.28

how deep?You can just see in this image that the water has risen so that it is lapping the bottom edge of the side rail of the boardwalk. Another six inches and the trail will be awash.

Perfect

Evgeny Morozov attacks what he calls solutionism:

an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are “solvable” with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.

Morozov makes a strong case, and there’s little I can do but quote from the piece:

Solutionists err by assuming, rather than investigating, the problems they set out to tackle. Given Silicon Valley’s digital hammers, all problems start looking like nails, and all solutions like apps.

* * *

Whenever technology companies complain that our broken world must be fixed, our initial impulse should be to ask: how do we know our world is broken in exactly the same way that Silicon Valley claims it is? What if the engineers are wrong and frustration, inconsistency, forgetting, perhaps even partisanship, are the very features that allow us to morph into the complex social actors that we are?

9 Circles

Julian Elijah Martinez delivers a masterful performance as Daniel Reeves in Bill Cain’s 9 Circles. The play is wrapped around the atrocities that took place in Al-Mahmudiyah, Iraq, in 2006.

In Cain’s retelling of the story, Reeves is a young man with little hope and a history of personality disorder who enlists in the Army and is sent to Iraq—perhaps the last person that you’d want to trust with lethal weapons in a high-stress situation. Reeves’s story of the violence he witnesses, his brutal over-response to it, and the slender moment of grace he experiences in the meantime is unpacked by a series of interviews and meetings with various officers, psychiatrists, chaplains, and lawyers. His interlocutors are played by an ensemble of three (Scott McCormick, Jonathan Feuer, and Katy Carkuff), and the doubling serves to emphasize Reeves’s disorientation and isolation; on at least one occasion, he remarks to a new character played by an actor we have already seen, “You look familiar.” Each one tries to put his own spin on Reeves’s tale, and it’s only at the end, in a bravura monologue in which he undergoes death by lethal injection, that Reeves wrests control of the narrative and lets us viscerally feel what it’s really like to be him in this wretched situation.

One of Reeves’s lawyers remarks that his history is a threat to American complacency (and the complacency of all who practice violence) because it opens up a sympathy for the enemy. And as that sympathy knocks down the barrier between foes, how can any war survive? It is Cain’s play that instills sympathy for Reeves, and with that barrier down, how can the scapegoating murder that is capital punishment survive?

Carkuff’s scene as the Army “shrink” is particularly strong, as the career psychiatrist must walk the line between, on the one hand, compassion for her patient and getting him out of harm’s way (his own and others’), and on the other, the need to “recycle” warriors back to a state of fitness for duty and return them to the front lines.

  • 9 Circles, by Bill Cain, directed by Jennifer L. Nelson, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

Everywhere a sign

Martin Austermuhle updates us on the District’s gradual replacement of its street name signs with new ones that are set in mixed case. There are, um, some bugs to be worked out. But the new design with rounded corners and a white border, as seen in the signs for Sherman Avenue, N.W. and Columbia Road, N.W., are rather good—indeed an improvement on the current signs. Even if they do use Freeway Gothic instead of Clearview.

Stargrazing

Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring), discovered just this January, is expected to come within 100,000 km of Mars in October 2014, as O.M. reports (as Babbage). Perhaps even closer: the track of a comet is not as predictable as that of an asteroid, as the flying snowball ejects mass on its approach to the sun. Astronomers, professionals and amateurs alike, are looking at the possibility of an even closer approach, and an actual impact is not out of the question at this point.

Update: More reporting on the story, with a fabulous hed and subhed for us Cole Porter fans.

Reporting antics

She remembered her days as a television interviewer, her beguiling confidence and charm; here as nowhere else they must understand how that was a sham. Her acting was another matter. The things she was ashamed of were not what they must think she was ashamed of; not a flopping bare breast, but a failure she couldn’t seize upon or explain.

* * *

The thing she was ashamed of, in acting, was that she might have been paying attention to the wrong things, reporting antics, when there was always something further, a tone, a depth, a light, that she couldn’t get and wouldn’t get.

—Alice Munro, “Who Do You Think You Are?”, The Beggar Maid

At the park: 54

Nesting season at Huntley Meadows Park has started already. Excerpts from my e-mail report to park staff from Sunday’s work day:

Every year, or so it seems, the birds start nesting earlier. We have 7 Hooded Merganser eggs in box #1, and another hoodie flushed from box #10. Photographers also report that a Wood Duck drake has also been hanging about this area at the beginning of the boardwalk.

We checked the other boxes in the wetland and topped up the wood chips. Box #6 looks to be in serviceable condition — no need to replace it this year. The latch on #62 is troublesome, as it has swollen and rusted in the weather; I will look for a screw-lock ring that fits it better.

Target winter species observed: Northern Pintail, Northern Shoveler, Green-winged Teal

Water gauge reading: 0.32

coming soonConstruction for the wetland restoration project is really finally happening this year. Here’s a view upstream along Barnyard Run, back toward the observation tower. Expect this reach to look very different in a few months.

Munro decoded

Flo kept the candy up behind the counter, on a slanted shelf, in open boxes, out of reach but not out of sight of children. Rose had to watch her chance, then climb up on the stool and fill a bag whatever she could grab—gum drops, jelly beans, licorice allsorts, maple buds, chicken bones.

—Alice Munro, “Privilege,” The Beggar Maid

Chicken bones? This old-timey confection turns out to be a hard candy tube, usually butterscotch or molasses, filled with peanut butter and rolled in cocoanut. The actual candy doesn’t sound any more palatable than its metaphorical tenor.

There is another version, cinnamon stuffed with bittersweet chocolate, from Ganong of New Brunswick, that sounds much tastier.

She went into the dining to check the money she had saved from Family Allowance checks. It was in the bottom of the silver muffin dish. Thirteen dollars. She meant to add that to what Patrick gave her to get to Victoria.

—”Mischief,” The Beggar Maid

Canada’s Family Allowance program went into effect in 1945 as its first non-means-tested income redistribution plan. At the time the story takes place (about 1960?), Rose would have received about six dollars a month for her daughter Anna. Reforms of the program in the 1970s began to wear away at its universal subsidy provisions; the program was completely replaced with the Child Tax Benefit program in 1992.

Sax-Zim Bog

The weather cooperated with me for my visit to the Sax-Zim Bog Birding Festival in northeastern Minnesota. Though the temperature never rose above freezing, the snow and wind held off until I had departed for home. Saturday’s field trip covered the bog in St. Louis County, while Sunday we ranged up and down the shore of Lake Superior.

Good weather means good birds, and I got good looks at many of them. A total species count of about 35, with 10 lifers, good enough for me to break the 400 mark. Some highlights:

industrial landscapeLifer Common Goldeneye (Bucephala clangula) as well as Long-tailed Duck (Clangula hyemalis) at Agate Bay, where immense ore loading facilities loomed. In this part of the country, the unit trains loaded with dark gray rock are carrying iron ore, not coal.

ducks, bridge, and lightfar endBetter looks at the goldeneyes in Duluth Harbor, and enough of them to sort through in hopes of finding a Barrow’s. A squatty lighthouse marks the channel into the harbor.

Multiple views of Pine Grosbeaks (Pinicola enucleator) and two species of redpolls at a couple of stops, including one at a feeder station run by the friends group. The porta-john at this stop was the cleanest, most well-appointed one I’ve ever seen. And purple!

yes, it's a borealI wasn’t even expecting a lot of success with owls, but I picked up four new birds in this family. The Boreal Owl (Aegolius funereus), sitting calmly in a bare tree about 15 feet above Admiral Road, was a new bird for a lot of us, hence the pileup of birders and vehicles.

A scamper over to Superior, Wisconsin to see two Snowy Owls (Nyctea scandiaca) (yet another life tick) at Richard I. Bong Airport.

We did most of our birding from our transport, school buses driven masterfully by Dan and Amy, with quick sallies outside with the scopes. While this approach to birding involves a lot of window maintenance (wiping and scraping condensation), it’s nice not to have to carry the scope very far.

no woodpeckers todayWe did get a little walking in, in an unsuccessful attempt at some woodpecker specialties. The woody vegetation in the bog is made up of spruce, larch, aspen, and birch, with whips of willows in clumps. The peaty soils also support sundews and lady’s slippers (sleeping under this February snow).

first dayit's warm insideHome base for the festival is the community center at Meadowlands, the sort of place that would be a VFW hall if Meadowlands were a big enough town to support a VFW. The amenties were spartan, but clean and effective.

still in businessbio breakOn Saturday’s trip, a bio break at the fire station in the hamlet of McDavitt was much appreciated by the group.

KUMD 103.3 kept me company on each of the 1-hour drives from Duluth to the bog and back again.

Hmm, the literature says that Connecticut Warbler is a specialty nester at the bog. Maybe a trip during the breeding season is in order.