Some links: 108

Hmm, the Times and the Post have different headline casing styles.

At the park: 153

The nesting season for our Wood Ducks and Hooded Mergansers has been a bit topsy-turvy:

Good news, bad news, what’s new? We have at least 3 new Wood Duck clutches started in the past 10 days or so. So part of the bad news is that we’ll probably be working in July. More bad news is that we lost at least one clutch to predation, and another to abandonment. Back on the plus side, 3 boxes hatched out in the past week, for a total of 6 for the season. And C and N found young in Box #7, which will make 7 boxes.

For our next work day, we’ll only need to check 5 boxes: #2, #7, #6, #1, and #3. Let’s set that date as Sunday, 8 June. We won’t need the full complement of the team. Let me know if you can make it on the 8th.

Then, depending on what we find on the 8th, we might go in late June or early July….

Vielen Dank!

NC-VA Coastal Plain 2025

the groupI took my first birding trip with Victor Emanuel Nature Tours (VENT), running up the coast from Wilmington, N.C. to Norfolk, Va. Kevin Burke was our excellent guide, always making sure that everyone got on the bird at hand—not to mention handling the driving (always ready to give an extra lift not on the tour), lodging logistics, and finding tasty restaurants. We were five participants; here’s Kevin in the lead of the other four on the beach near Oregon Inlet.

my rideclosed on SaturdayI rode Amtrak to get to Tidewater, but since the tour was one-way, I needed to bridge the gap between the cities. I hopped a Greyhound/FlixBus for the first time in decades. While the coach was quite comfortable, I needn’t have paid for a double seat because there were few riders. As I expected from the barebones stop at Union Station here in D.C., most bus stations these days are tragically spartan, with no options for food or toilets. We pulled in to parking lots and abandoned gas stations. Here’s one exception: a spiffy new transit hub in Greenville, N.C. Ha! Closed on Saturday.

early stopSunday was our first day out birding. Kevin had scouted a little-known corner of pine forest where Red-cockaded Woodpecker (Dryobates borealis) could be found, answering its wake-up call at 07:15. At Orton Pond, a very cooperative Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citrea) turned up, as well as an American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) that slunk through the water. Down the road my first lifer for the trip arrived, Bachman’s Sparrow (Peucaea aestivalis).

After lunch, I started to learn the handful of seaside plants, among them Coastal Water-pennywort (Hydrocotyle bonariensis), American Sea Rocket (Cakile edentula), and Saw Greenbrier (Smilax bona-nox).

The next day, Kevin improvised a ferry trip to Shackleford Banks, where I found a beautiful new tiger beetle for me, Eastern Beach Tiger Beetle (Habroscelimorpha dorsalis) (woot!) (likely ssp. media), and a robber fly that predates on the tiger beetle, Sand Hammertail (Efferia albibarbus) (woot-woot!).

And then, mostly a travel day to Hatteras on two care ferries, but we did stop at a boat launch access road for another lifer and long-tormenting nemesis bird, Least Bittern (Botaurus exilis).

sea breezeI came backWednesday was scheduled for a pelagic trip, but the weather had other plans, as the surf at Avon Pier illustrates. So once again Kevin cooked up some good birding, including a visit to Bodie Island Lighthouse. The Dancing Turtle in Hatteras is a good place for early morning coffee and pastries, but skip the bagels. (David’s new rule: Don’t order bagels in a shop without “bagels” in its name.)

Thursday we got out on to the water: we were advised that it would be “sporty” and “confused.” Indeed. For the first time in decades, I joined the Fellowship of Ralph. But after tossing all of my skimpy breakfast and coffee, and having a bit of a lie-down, I roused myself to photograph four lifers, including two storm-petrels, Wilson’s (Oceanites oceanicus) and Band-rumped (Hydrobates castro). Also spotted: several flying fish and a Portuguese Man O’ War (Physalia physalis)—surprisingly tiny. The captain of our boat could take a note from VENT on customer service and being welcoming.

Takeaways:

  • Shutter priority is your friend. The bird is moving in three dimensions, and the boat is moving in three different dimensions.
  • You’re not too old for dramamine.

We wrapped up the tour, skirting the Great Dismal Swamp. Seven life birds for me; the group got skunked on Belted Kingfisher (?!). I have a thing for Boat-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus major).

Your Eastern North Carolina dialect word is preesht, that is, “I appreciate it,” otherwise, “thank you.”

Head Over Heels

Jeff Whitty and James Magruder’s free adaptation of Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th-century Arcadia, with songs from The Go-Go’s and places nearby, is a great wakeup for a drowsy Sunday afternoon. Amping up the cross-dressing plots of Sidney’s original material, Head Over Heels upends gender norms and is, in the words of a program note, “a celebration of queer joy in all its forms.” The text, a blend of Elizabethan English, florid “Eclogue” spoken by the shepherd Musidorus, and 21st-century language, is a language lover’s delight. “Ventilate the belfry of thy mind,” one character says. Wait, what?

Worthy of note are very fine ensemble choreography by Maurice Johnson, Stephen Russell Murray’s subclinically hysterical worrywart courtier Dametas, and Julia Link’s Pamela, delivering a righteous rock and roll belt.

It wouldn’t be a Constellation show without puppets by Matthew Pauli, including an enormous snake puppet on rods and a singing chorus of sheep (“Mad about You”).

  • Head Over Heels, songs by The Go-Go’s,* based on The Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney, conceived and original book by Jeff Whitty, adapted by James Magruder, directed by Allison Arkell Stockman, music direction by Walter “Bobby” McCoy, Constellation Theatre Company, Washington

*and others

This is be Constellation’s last production at the (perhaps snakebit venue) Source Theatre.

Clifton Institute bioblitz May 2025

I participated in another bioblitz organized by the Clifton Institute, this time at Sunnyside Farm & Conservancy in Rappahannock County. I visited the farm last year for a dragonfly count for the Institute. With several insect experts in the group, I was able to file 57 observations, including

  • a Giant Bark Aphid (Longistigma caryae) resting on Dr. Hardtacks’ back bumper;
  • a Twice-stabbed Stink Bug (Cosmopepla lintneriana), always a popular common name;
  • a pair of conjoined Azure Bluets (Enallagma aspersum), a new damselfly for me;
  • a passable recording of Prairie Warbler (Setophaga discolor) against the background noise of breezes and naturalist chatter; I used my tablet and the Merlin app, rather than my dedicated audio recorder, trading off a better directional mic for on-the-fly ID suggestions;
  • a non-native cress that I didn’t know, Land Cress (Barbarea verna);
  • a very lucky shot of Common Baskettail (Epitheca cynosura) on the wing.

measuring the tare weightlogging the dataEarly in the afternoon, we took a break from chasing plants to observe technicians working with an American Kestrel (Falco sparverius), one of the study subjects in the Institute’s long-running research project into this species’ ecology on farmland and restored prairie.

Temporary

Subtweets from WaniKani? 仮 Temporary

ｲ Leader + 反 Anti

Meaning Mnemonic

Your leader is very anti-everything, making it all temporary. You get a new shirt, “I’m anti shirts!” she yells, and out it goes.

She tires of things so quickly, you hardly have time to get used to them before they’re gone.

Reading Mnemonic

The leader’s most temporary possession is her car (か). Or… cars, because they’re all very temporary. She buys one, drives it around, and then suddenly she’s anti red car. She needs a blue one!

Picture all of the temporary cars she’s tried filling up an entire junkyard. They’re all a little different, but in the end they were all just temporary fads.

How many houses

§18 Don’t let it bother you that languages (2) and (8) consist only of orders. If you want to say that they are therefore incomplete, ask yourself whether our own language is complete—whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in to it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte

At the park: 152

My report for April to the team:

Whew! I am caught up with my paperwork for the moment. Data and photos posted to Cornell, thank you. Six new clutches were started in April and are now incubating, 5 Wood Duck and 1 Hooded Merganser. On the downside, we clearly have two nests that have been abandoned and that we will clean out on our next work day. Nothing has hatched out yet, but I expect boxes #1 and #3 to be hatched by next time, as well as possibly box #6.

So, we’ve seen nesting activity in 11 of the 16 boxes, which is fairly typical. Plus that early arriving, fast shrinking Hooded Merganser brood that would have used a natural cavity.

Work days in May will be 11 May and 25 May (Memorial Day weekend). 11 May will go rather quick, because we have several boxes incubating that we will skip….

Arigatō gozaimasu!

Plug the memory hole: 2

One more piece, this time from Julian Lucas for The New Yorker, about volunteer efforts to lifeboat federal government databases.

Oh, and that farcical white paper seeking to justify 47’s “reciprocal tariffs” is still out there, now as a PDF, and still smelling of AI slop. If that paper were submitted by a student in a high school course, I might give it a passing grade. Undergrad, nope.

Some links: 107

Green Ridge State Forest butterflies

Rick Borchelt led a field trip to Allegany County, Maryland, targeting early-flying elfins and azures. It was a great opportunity to see some new butterflies—Brown Elfin (Callophrys augustinus), Northern Azure (Celastrina lucia), and Silvery Blue (Glaucopsyche lygdamus)—as well as to meet some shale barren-specialist plants. I learned why I’m confused by Summer Azures (C. neglecta): they have two broods in this part of the country, the first of them flying earlier than Spring Azure (C. ladon). And we picked up some moths along the way, including azure-lookalike Bluish Spring Moth (Lomographa semiclarata) and Double-lined Gray (Cleora sublunaria) (several at the Oak Barrel Cafe).

Fun plants included Shale-barren Ragwort (Packera antennariafolia), Shale-barren Pussytoes (Antennaria virginica), and Moss-pink (Phlox subulata).

Waiting for Godot

This Irish/American production of Beckett’s cornerstone work splits the difference in pronunciation, some characters saying GAWD-oh and some saying go-DOUGH. Joseph McGucken layers a slice of vaudeville on to his Vladmir. As Estragon, Barry McEvoy summons a touching sequence of grunts and sighs to end each sequence of “We’re waiting for Godot./Ah!”

  • Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, directed by Robert McNamara, Scena Theatre, Washington

Perhaps influenced by my recent reading, I was struck by the reverberations of Wittgenstein’s “builders” (“Slab!”, “Block!”) with Pozzo’s commands to Lucky (“On! Back!”).

New Mexico circuit: 8

It’s high time to wrap up the New Mexico trip reports.

Two trips to Randall Davey Audubon Center, just outside Santa Fe, turned up flocks of Common Ravens loudly kettling in the updrafts from the ridge, often in pairs. At times the birds swooped so low that I could hear wingbeats. Pretty cool.

I followed the loop trail just to where the ponderosa pines started to come in, at about 7425 feet. So I only got one observation, from a distance, and only good enough to ID to subsection. (I still remember the strawberry-scented pinebark from a visit to Rocky Mountain National Park a couple decades ago.)

Nice photos of Mountain Chickadee (Poecile gambeli) and Pygmy Nuthatch (Sitta pygmaea). More Rubber Rabbitbrush; I can understand why there was an effort to tap the plant for rubber—it’s all over the place.

Persistence pays: on my second visit I located Juniper Titmouse (Baeolophus ridgwayi) (honoring Robert Ridgway), another lifer for the trip.

better than the birdingDripping Springs Natural Area, in the mountains east of Las Cruces, is a BLM property. When the birds don’t cooperate, take pictures of the landscape, eh? This is a view of the Organ Mountains from La Cueva picnic area.

I spotted a second butterfly species for the trip (it was February, so I was impressed): a trio of Sleepy Oranges (Abaeis nicippe) on Woolly Locoweed (Astragalus mollissimus). And a few snaps of Fishhook Barrel Cactus (Ferocactus wislizeni).

Thank you to all the local iNat folks concurring with and correcting my IDs! I ratcheted my lifetime ratio of species to observations back up to 1:2. (Just in time for EDRR season.)

Seven new birds for my list, bringing my ABA Area total to 440. Plus one for next time: at White Sands, a Sagebrush Sparrow (Artemisiospiza nevadensis) with photographs good enough for an observation, but I can’t say that I saw the bird well enough to count it for my list. My list, my hike, my rules.

Tax relief may never come/But it don’t worry me

At least 47 hasn’t promoted Incitatus to consul. Yet.

Leader from this week’s Economist: President Trump’s mindless tariffs will cause economic havoc (gift link).

There is no reason why his extra tariffs should eliminate the [current account] deficit. Insisting on balanced trade with every trading partner individually is bonkers—like suggesting that Texas would be richer if it insisted on balanced trade with each of the other 49 states,* or asking a company to ensure that each of its suppliers is also a customer.

*and the District—Ed.