Running to IAD and Loudoun looks like Thanksgiving: a compromise between WMATA and the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission will make enough cars available for service so that the extension can open.
On deck: 23
New books! But I really need to catch up on my Goodreads notes.
Mason and Bailey: 6
Better late than never, one pic from the Mason & Bailey Club walk in the Boundary Bridge area of Rock Creek Park, back on Labor Day weekend. We did spot an Ovenbird.
Upgrades (?): 5
Aargh! Character encodings and sidebar widgets got fritzed when I took the upgrade to WordPress 6. This afternoon will be about cleaning up some of the mess.
Silver Line progress report: 54
A first look at Metro’s newest map, with all the Silver Line stations colored in.
The Metro challenge is about to get much longer.
Not opera
Helen Shaw reviews David Greenspan’s realization of Four Saints in Three Acts, by Gertrude Stein.
One must deliberately choose the show over other temptations: one must choose to listen. So we chose. We were choosing there. In a way, we are still choosing, with a great many saints there, who are choosing there together.
At the park: 134
And here’s the graph:
At the park: 133
I am finally getting all the records together for last spring’s breeding season of Wood Ducks and Hooded Mergansers. My notes for the team:
Well, it’s been a minute since we last checked our boxes. Here’s the final spreadsheet:
The mergansers were much more efficient and effective, hatching and fledging 64 ducklings from 72 eggs laid in 5 clutches. By contrast, the Wood Ducks had a bad year: 12 nests started and 110 eggs laid, but a couple of big nest failures led to only 28 ducklings hatched and fledged.
We had two boxes with evidence of predation by Black Ratsnake. I wonder how the snakes have figured out their way around the predator guards.
There are some minor maintenance notes in the spreadsheet that I will follow up on next season.
Thank you for all your help!
I’m still working on the graph and the grand summary table.
VMN conference 2022
A few snaps and reports from this year’s Virginia Master Naturalist Program Statewide Conference and Volunteer Training, based in Virginia Beach.
I took a walk on my own at First Landing State Park. I found Downy Rattlesnake Plaintain (Goodyera pubescens) in fruit and a local specialty, American Olive (Cartrema americana) (formerly genus Osmanthus), in fruit. Some Spanish Moss. Otherwise, there’s not a lot of variety in this loblolly woods. Target practice at nearby Fort Story was momentarily alarming.
In fact, there are few natural places in Tidewater Virginia that are far from some sort of military installation. I don’t know that I learn to filter out the noise from the fighter jets.
On Friday, a group visited Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. I got a clear look at one of our up-and-coming non-native invasives, Murdannia keisak—the flowers are itty-bitty. But the real prize of this trip was found by Margaret C. and others in the group: Waterspider Bog Orchid (Habenaria repens), not well attested in Virginia.
We did some mushrooming at Norfolk Botanical Garden. Small surprise: it began as a WPA project! There is a Japanese Garden that I would like to come back to visit. Saturday’s entomology workshop was cancelled, so we visited Virginia Tech’s Hampton Roads AREC (Agricultural Research and Extension Center). Blackberries and kiwis in the research plots. Mason’s Famous Lobster Rolls for dinner—maybe not an authentic recipe, but very tasty.
Sunday’s birding trip to Magothy Bay NAP was a bit of a bust, with only a couple flights of White Ibis appearing. I was informed that the local (Virginia) pronunciation is ma-GOE-thee, but Marylanders say MAG-uh-thee. I may have to break the news to the rest of the state.
Red
In the beginning there was the film…
—Stav Poleg, “Two Pictures of a Rose in the Dark”
Crooked CA watch: 6
Lest we forget: Carrie Johnson, “Justice Department filing on Mar-a-Lago documents puts Trump’s lawyers in focus:”
Former prosecutors who now defend white-collar criminal cases said it would be aggressive if the Justice Department were to prosecute Trump for lying to his attorneys, but that it’s happened before.
They point to a 2004 case involving the New York company Computer Associates. Executives there misled lawyers conducting an internal investigation into fraud at the business, knowing those statements would be passed along to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department.
Choking
(Maybe that’s what you’re seeing whenever you see a little swirling updraft of debris in the city: someone’s panic taking shape, someone’s death setting out to find their body.)
—Ben Lerner, “Café Loup”
Procyon lotor
The fox, raccoon, opossum, squirrel, mole, rat, and mouse have adapted themselves to civilization…. Protective laws have saved the raccoon from extinction….
Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion (1940, 1947, 1992), p. 20
Abingdon 2022: 3
On my dilatory way home, I swung south into Ashe County, North Carolina and a visit to Bluff Mountain Preserve. Bluff Mountain is but one of the ridgelines protected by the Nature Conservancy in this area. According to my guide Susan, the mountain offers a rare high-elevation mafic bedrock, with an endemic reindeer lichen species on the outcrops. In addition, ten acres of wetland comprise a fen; there’s an Eastern Hemlock woods; and a rather nice meadow. The New River provides drainage, so I had crossed back from the Tennessee River basin to the Ohio.
We spent just a quarter of an hour or so at the fen, but I zeroed in on something unusual that turned out to be Sticky False Asphodel (Triantha glutinosa), a species of conservation concern. Nearby, Susan pointed out Canada Burnet (Sanguisorba canadensis) and Smooth Yellow False Foxglove (Aureolaria flava). We found lots of interesting mushrooms popping up along the trail (it had rained recently), but with only three hours up on top of the mountain, we didn’t have much time to dawdle.
Logistics for this tour were a little unsettled until the day, and there was more climbing from the parking lot than we had planned on, but it was a good hike. Next time I’ll wave my “I’m a donor” flag more loudly; we crossed paths with a donors’ tour on our way up the mountain.
Ti in VA
Fun fact from Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion, compiled by workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Virginia: Virginia, as of the 1903s, was the leading producer of titanium in the country (p. 110). And apparently it still is, along with Nevada and Utah, although most titanium is now imported.