There is a spiffy new sign at the park entrance designating Huntley Meadows Park as a stop on the Virginia Birding and Wildlife Trail. In the capsule description of the site, the designation of Wild Turkey as a year-round resident may be a little optimistic.
Gassing up
Revised testing methodology from the Environmental Protection Agency means substantially reduced gas mileage estimates for hybrid vehicles, as John Gartner reports. This reduction is in keeping with anecdotal reports that mileage estimates for hybirds had been inflated. As an example: while the previous estimates for the Toyota Prius were 60 mpg City/51 mpg Highway/55 mpg Combined, the new numbers are 48/45/46. (Remember that hybrids paradoxically get better mileage for EPA City conditions.)
What Gartner’s report doesn’t point out is that estimates for conventionally-powered cars are also being reduced. The old numbers for the 4-cylinder manual transmission Honda Accord were 26/34/29, dropping about 10% to 23/31/26.
Charlotte Church meets Enya meets Sarah Brightman
One more reason to read a book, a really long one, during pledge week: Claire Dederer explores the phenomenon that is Celtic Woman:
[Their popularity] may have something to do with the fact that they are Irish. Ireland is a country that does a lot of psychological heavy lifting for Americans. We’ve imbued the place with mysticism, greenness, quietude and rootedness. Milky-skinned maidens, singing beautiful music in front of a wall of ivy. It’s the very vision of what we want Ireland to be. Or at least what PBS viewers want Ireland to be.
At the park: 7
The mergansers appear to be done with nesting for the season; birders on the boardwalk spied a hen with seven merglets feeding on the main pond. The Wood Ducks, on the other hand, are still hard at work slow-cooking their eggs. We have five active nests, including (unfortunately) a dump nest with 22 eggs in it.
Aloft, we saw a mini-kettle of three Red-shouldered Hawks picking up altitude. We heard or saw a couple of heron species, gnatchatchers, cuckoos, flycatchers, and vireos, but generally didn’t pause to take closer looks. On the walk back through the woods, Myra and I paused over a perplexing male tanager (most likely a Scarlet), along with a female; the male showed lots of streaky orange.
There are noticeably fewer Canada Geese (Branta canadensis) in the main wetland this year, so perhaps whatever control measures are in force are being effective.
Shoot
Peter Schjeldahl recaps performance artist Chris Burden’s career for The New Yorker. I don’t know how long the link will stay alive, but check out this pithy definition:
In pragmatic terms, art is a privileged zone of gratuitous activity, with boundaries maintained by the agreement of the vested authorities. Artists of the Duchampian sort delighted in effacing the boundaries, which, with increasingly avid complicity on the authorities’ part, kept being redrawn to corral the effacements. It was a silly game, in the end. Ultimate limits were discovered, most pointedly by Burden, whose influence on conceptual and installational artists, to this day, is immeasurable.
Look out!
Paul Brians has a list of read-bumps (though he missed the one that always slows me down, even when it’s correct: miniscule* for minuscule). No kidding: yesterday as I was cleaning up someone else’s code, I had to remove an apostrophe from the plural reports.
(Link via Pogue’s Posts.)
Some numbers: 1
I hadn’t seen statistics from RFB&D on the number of borrowers for some time, so I was interested to see the breakdown in the 2006 annual report: the organization reckons the total number of student listeners in the past year to be 147,000, of which 118.6 thousand are served through institutions and 28.3 thousand as individuals. 76.5% of our students have learning disabilities (including dyslexia), while 19.2% are blind or otherwise visually impaired. The education level brackets are 40.0% elementary school; 34.3% high school; 19.4% undergraduate; 6.2% graduate school and other. The numbers for college and graduate school surprise me, because most of what we record in the D.C. unit is at the college level.
Volunteer hours for the period were 390,021, resulting in 140,300 hours of recorded material and 5,831 new books produced. This fits with my micro experience: in a two-hour session, I can produce about 60 minutes of recording, covering 10 to 30 book pages. The organization-wide ratio of 2.8 hours of volunteer time per hour of material is pulled up by sessions that use both a reader and a director, and by the overhead of checking and production. Another way to look at these numbers is to figure 66.9 hours of volunteer time to produce one book on CD. Plus paid staff time, of course.
Gluten’s 15 minutes
Avoiding gluten in the diet is becoming fashionable, reports Kate Murphy.
“A lot of alternative practitioners like chiropractors have picked up on it and are waving around magic silver balls, crystals and such, telling people they have gluten intolerance,” said Dr. Don W. Powell, a gastroenterologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
Sloane Miller, a 35-year-old freelance editor in New York, went on a gluten-free diet six months ago on the advice of her acupuncturist, even though a blood test and a biopsy indicated that she did not have celiac disease. Long plagued with gastrointestinal distress and believing that she might have an undetectable sensitivity to gluten, Ms. Miller said giving it up was “worth a try.”
Unfortunately, the inevitable backlash against this fad is likely to make life more inconvenient for those who legitimately suffer from CD.
Lafayette trip report: 4
Some non-birding props to hand out:
I had a nice meal, and a very nice couple of glasses of cabernet, at the Blue Dog Café. I had chosen it based on recommendations and its proximity to the hotel, unaware of its connection with the iconic canine of George Rodrigue. Heck, I didn’t even realize that Blue Dog was a Louisiana thing.
I slipped away from a couple of convention dinners and presentations to the Festival International de Louisiane, which (coincidentally?) was happening the same week as our birding event. Music on multiple stages, vendor booths from around the world, local food for $6 a hit—fabulous! My music choices ranged from local zydeco legends to Celtic and French gypsy-klezmer bands from Europe.
Under the rubric of the festival, I saw a staging of a version of Cody Daigle’s Life/Play, an experimental autobiographical blog-driven piece inspired by Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 Plays/365 Days. It’s a little raw, some of the playlets are not much more than shoe-gazing, but there are some genuine theatrical moments there. I especially liked the Compliment Fairy, the dance (28 January) that The Guy does the night that his play is presented, and the fact that some of the bits are so unstageable that they work better with The Director reading the stage directions.
Thanks to local chain CC’s Coffee House for providing free wi-fi access.
I saw no pelicans on this trip!? But I did spy two road-killed armadillos on I-12.
Found art
One of the things that annoys me about Tina Howe’s Museum is that it calls for any number of unrealistic behaviors on the part of the museum-goers and guards, specifically (at least in the production I saw recently) for a couple of the viewers to become entranced by the view out the museum’s window. And yet, and yet…
I took a visual break from this year’s Artomatic, held this year on two floors of a Crystal City office building, lately the precincts of the Patent and Trademark Office. (I was particularly taken by Jennifer Foley’s photographs of decaying New England mills.) I looked out the eighth-floor window to the east, onto a parking structure by the airport, bracketed by hardwoods lining the parkway in the foreground and the river and some of the grimier bits of the District in the background. There was something about the sweep of the scene and the flat light of this overcast Saturday. I looked out on the top level of the parking structure, nearly full of cars blue-white-black with a occassional dot of red, none of them moving, the scene a frozen bit of hustle-bustle. The scene had the timeless grandeur of an image by Jeff Wall.
At the park: 6
Well, I thought that the big splash of the morning would be the Wood Duck nest that has been started in the new box hard by the boardwalk, the one that is easy to see but hard to walk to through the cattails and brambles. But other events were brewing. The park staff had designated today Wetlands Awareness Day.
Myra and I worked the upper wetland and then came down to lower Banyard Run. I came up to box #62 and carefully opened the box from the side. I spied the white teardrop-eye of a female Wood Duck. Now when we unintentionally find a hen in a box, she is just as likely to flush through the side door as she is through the entrance hole at the front of the box. So I took a step backwards, in case she went for that route, with optional gut evacuation. I stepped back, and then my world turned into a slow-motion backfall into a foot of water and six inches of mud, as I uttered imprecations all the way down.
Paul (nursing a recently-sutured foot) and Myra were sympathetic, but there isn’t much you can do to help out a guy who’s just found his own awareness of the wetland in the seat of his jeans. I splodged back to the parking area. At least the water wasn’t early-March cold the way it was the last time that I fell in.
Most of my gear is air-drying or in the laundry. Too soon to tell whether my optics suffered any permanent damage.
Why is it that this sort of thing never happens to Annie Dillard?
Cixelsyd
Jacqueline L. Salmon reports on her daughter’s struggles with dyslexia; RFB&D turns out to be a resource for the two of them.
Lafayette trip report: 3
I closed out my field trips at the convention with a bang on Sunday, riding a van driven by Donna Dittmann and Steve Cardiff into Jeff Davis, Calcasieu, and Cameron Parishes west of town. We hit the farmland (much of it in rice) and refuge impoundments and saw a surprising variety of birds from various families, some of them I expected and some that I didn’t—American Coot (Fulica americana) (known locally as the “Ivory-Billed Gallinule”), the spectacularly-plumed Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus), shorebirds, waders, Dickcissel (Spiza americana), grackles, larids, and the “wow” bird of the trip, Northern Caracara (Caracara cheriway). We saw phalaropes doing their signature spinning; stilts on the nest; a mixed flock of cormorants, ibis, spoonbills, and egrets scaring up food; a nighthawk hunkered down on a fencepost; Cattle Egrets (Bubulcus ibia) actually hanging out with cattle. Donna pointed out some remnants of damage from Hurricane Rita, but we remained 30 miles inland or so, so we didn’t see the evidence that Amy Hooper witnessed on her field trip to the coast. The casualty of the trip was the tripod mount from my scope, which shattered (probably as a result of my abuse), but it’s all good, ’cause the mount never worked that well for me. I exceeded my best expectations for lifers for the whole convention, crashing through the 350-species milestone to end at #357.
We spent the day before east of Lafayette in the Atchafalaya Basin. We scraped up some warblers and my target bird for the trip, Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris), on a walk led in part by Jim Delahoussaye, who lives along the river. (I first saw this bunting in a movie (maybe it was one of the Batman flicks), and when I saw this impossible-looking bird, colored with blocks of green and cherry red and electric blue, I figured that I must be looking at CGI effects.)
Jim helped illustrate why you don’t want to step on the fire ant mounds.
Then it was on to the water in a flotilla of three gas-powered flatboats. I didn’t see anything new here, though someone eared a Blue-winged Warbler (Vermivora pinus). But, as my seatmate Dick put it, this part of the trip was “kinda touristy, but cool.” Our destination, such as it was, was a Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) nest. When boatman Jacques finally cut the engine, the stillness was so deep that we could hear the eagle vocalizing.
I got lucky and had great weather for the whole trip, in the sense that I wasn’t birding in the rain or in a 30-knot gale. The storms that blew through came on our off day. The hardcore among us took the frontal movement as a cue to hare off into Cameron Parish hoping for a fallout. And the mosquitoes behaved themselves!
On Friday, David Sibley presented on the confusions, delusions, and self-fulfilling expectations of field ID, and told some entertaining war stories, including one about the time that he identified a bit of red flagging tied to a barbed-wire fence as a Vermilion Flycatcher. My subtitle for the talk would be, “Why You May Not Want to Scramble Off to Delaware Every Time Someone Reports a Rarity on the Hotline.”
The highlight of Friday’s chalk talks was a short presentation by Keith Ouchley of the Nature Conservancy on the natural provinces of coastal Louisiana—the alluvial valley (a/k/a bottomland hardwood forest), the savannah-like longleaf pine forest, and the coastal prairies and marshes. Each has been transformed in its own way by agroforestry, as the tallgrass prairie has been converted to rice and sugar cane farming; the pine woods planted in faster-growing loblolly pine; and the alluvial region literally burned to make room for soybeans. We learned that Red-cockaded Woodpecker (Picoides borealis), a pine woods specialist, is responding to artificial nest cavities built into the trunks of trees.
No one is neutral
Andrew C. Revkin explains why I feel uneasy about the current carbon-offset market:
As long as the use of fossil fuels keeps climbing—which is happening relentlessly around the world—the emission of greenhouse gases will keep rising. The average American, by several estimates, generates more than 20 tons of carbon dioxide or related gases a year; the average resident of the planet about 4.5 tons.
At this rate, environmentalists say, buying someone else’s squelched emissions is all but insignificant.
The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”
“This whole game is badly in need of a modern Martin Luther,” Mr. Hayes added.
Knowing when to edit
Ruth La Ferla profiles designer Santo Loquasto:
To reinforce the emotional heat of 110 in the Shade, a Roundabout revival of the 1963 musical with songs by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones (The Fantasticks), for which he also did both sets and costumes, he hung an enormous disc from the ceiling of Studio 54. Depending on how it is lighted and angled, it functions as a moon or, more often, as an implacably brilliant sun.
The knack for making less say more has established Mr. Loquasto as one of America’s foremost stage designers. “Santo has a great editorial sense, said Doug Hughes, the director of Inherit the Wind. “Among the battery of props that are all exquisitely chosen, he will recognize during rehearsal weeks that many are superfluous and will happily cut them away.”