Grand Teton National Park: 1

still thereI left the Salt Lake City metro for four days in Grand Teton National Park. It did not disappoint, as the cliché goes. I even spotted a few species of charismatic megafauna.

some assembly requiredThe first two days I spent in the vicinity of Jenny Lake. Tuesday I took two walks along the east and north sides: I had ambitions of walking the three-quarter loop around to the shuttle boat dock, but the elevation and my conditioning quashed that idea. Generally the trails were in good shape, but I encountered at least one choose-your-own-adventure opportunity.

Lots of new plants, many of them in flower: a native mahonia, Berberis repens. An orangetip butterfly, Julia Orangetip (Anthocharis julia). The first of several new ground squirrels for me, Yellow-pine Chipmunk (Neotamias amoenus): my guidebook says, “Steals campground food,” and I often found them around buildings and parking lots.

I gradually figured out that the unfamiliar warblers were Audubon’s, conspecifics of the Myrtle Warblers from back home. My notes say, “Yellow-rumped Warbler and Ruby-crowned Kinglet and Chipping Sparrow are all over—but can I get a good photo? No.”

on offerI had acquired a bell and a canister of bear spray in preparation for this part of the trip, but I might have been able to rent my bear spray. Brown-headed Cowbirds were the mooch birds on the Jenny Lake campus. My trail tracker app reported that I hiked 4.5 miles.

where to next?The next day was devoted to as much vertical as I could handle. I rode the boat shuttle to the west side of Jenny Lake and started the climb toward Inspiration Point. The first stretches were fairly easy, and the junctions were more clearly marked. A tip was being passed along the trail that a cow Moose (Alces alces) was hanging out, so I took a little side trip.

As indicated by guidebooks, the trail was very popular, even on a Wednesday morning; I wouldn’t have needed the bear spray.

Another example of a wildflower genus that I know from the mid-Atlantic, but a different species, Lanceleaf Spring Beauty (Claytonia lanceolata). A second new ground squirrel, Common Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel (Callospermophilus lateralis)—it didn’t hang around very long. A shrub that I would find often, Mountain Lover, or Oregon Boxwood (Paxistima myrsinites).

mountain viewOnce you’re at the fork for Hidden Falls, the going gets steeper. The good thing about an out-and-back hike, I wrote in my field notes, is that you can decide when to stop. My trail tracker app reported that I had reached 7000 feet of elevation, and that was good enough for me. A net climb of 300 feet on a 1.7 mile walk.

gently down the streamI took the first of many looks for American Dipper in the fast-running mountain streams.

Some links: 113

  • An interesting perspective from Quico Toro on resolving the global warming crisis without stifling economic development: How to Save the Planet Without Screwing Over Poor People.
  • When “effective immediately” means “maybe.”
  • Richard Gilbert explains why I was confused by Harold G. Henderson’s statement that “haiku is written in 5-7-5 jion.”
  • Two pieces that sound the alarm that everything is ruined, by Julian Baggini and Christian B. Miller. I agree with Miller that patience is still a virtue to be sought, but the dependence on instant answers pre-dates easy access to LLMs and AI-assisted search.
  • I Am Hummingbird, Lord of Your Doorknob, by Julie Sharbutt.

    So you and your creatures went inside to stuff your flesh beaks with sauce worms and stare at your RAWRAWRAWR wall. The time was nigh and I went to work, collecting twigs and sticks and dog fur and stems and cattails and twigs and string and SNAKESKIN and bark and moss and fish scales and thistle and hay and twine and thread and tinsel and CAT WHISKERS and leaves and twigs and DANDELION DOWN and pine needles and Halloween wig hair and USED SPIDERWEBS—THEY WERE EMPTY WHEN I FOUND THEM, GET A GRIP, THE SPIDERS ARE FINE, YOU THINK A SPIDER’S NOT JUST FINE?

Indecent

1st Stage’s production of Paula Vogel’s meta-play (an earlier production reviewed) is enlivened by cabaret-style music composed and arranged by Lisa Gutkin and Aaron Halva; music direction by Joe Walsh, Marika Anne Countouris, and Deborah Jacobson; and choreography by Robert Bowrn Smith. Alex Levy’s crisp direction keeps the multiple scene shifts and costume changes snappy. And the practical water effect in the show’s closing moments is a knockout.

YHBL

Yellow-headed Blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus Bonaparte) (YHBL)1 has been a nemesis bird, a jinx bird for me. Over the course of six or eight trips to the west, I have not seen one for myself.

I was chatting with birders at the Great Salt Lake Bird Festival, and talked about birds we wanted to see. I sheepishly admitted that I was still on the trail of YHBL. “Oh, go to Farmington Bay, you’ll see them, no problem,” was the first bit of advice. Farmington Bay is an arm of the lake in Davis County; presumably they meant the sprawling Wildlife Management Area by that name. Then, on that Saturday, I got more targeted advice: Eccles Wildlife Education Center. “It’s where we used to have the festival until we outgrew it.”

So that afternoon, off I went. I headed up the track that runs north from the Center’s visitor center. Some nice birds in the ponds on either side, some of them a bit distant but photographable. Cornell’s Merlin app was running, and it suggested an audio match for Yellow-headed Blackbird. It occurred to me that I should review what the bird sounded like, so I pulled up the Sibley app as well. Towards the end of the track, almost to the northern boundary of the property, Merlin was matching on hardly anything else than YHBL.

So that raucous, creaky sound I was hearing, like an rusty screen door falling downstairs, was my bird.2 And then, a flash of yellow dropped out of the phragmites into the shorter grass.

Yay! a glimpse of the bird, enough for a twitch. But for a bird that I had sought for so long, could I get an identifiable photograph?

A bit of patience was in order.

Maybe a half dozen birds were up in the tops of the reeds, singing (yes, technically they’re songbirds). I snapped a few pix, generally seeing most of a partly obscured bird. All the while they continued to, um, vocalize.

I was ready to declare victory and return down the track, when my best photo op appeared, out in the open with the flick of white on the wing visible. Fifteen minutes of watching and listening had paid off.3

ABA Area lifer #453, Yellow-headed Blackbird.

1The only member of its genus, it is saddled with a binomial that repeats the genus and species epithet, literally “yellow-head yellow-head.” Perhaps Charles Bonaparte expected that it would be moved into a different genus, retaining the species epithet.

2Honestly, if I were a Briton, I would be miffed that we use the same name for the all-black singing thrush of Paul McCartney’s song (Turdus merula)and for the group of squonky oriole relatives of North America: grackles, cowbirds, and blackbirds.

3Casual birder and even more casual photographer that I am, armed with no more than a 300mm lens, I got an image good enough for my purposes. But it’s hardly going to be a competition winner.

Rappahannock County dragonfly/damselfly count 2026

A return to The Farm at Sunnyside to look for odonates. I photographed two new species for me, a really nice image of Amber-winged Spreadwing (Lestes eurinus), and Stream Bluet (Enallagma exsulans).

I didn’t stop for plants (trip leader John Lenox was only into dragonflies) but, on the run, I did catch a lovely dorsal view of one of our super-common small butterflies, Eastern Tailed-Blue (Cupido comyntas), a female. Mixed feelings about the dipteran I snapped which turned out to be a species of deer fly, Chrysops callidus, and which turned out to be ovipositing. Quite surprised to get the ID on something in an order I rarely see, Black Dancer Caddisfly (Mystacides sepulchralis).

I must have sweated more than I thought: I’ve been slurping fluids all evening.

Great Salt Lake Bird Festival

Every birding festival is different. The Great Salt Lake Bird Festival, based in Davis County, Utah, provided field trips to some interesting sites—and a keynote speaker with great photos who, alas, overstayed his welcome.

dry creekbedFirst up was a walk in Dimple Dell Regional Park, in the foothills of the Wasatch Front, led by Tori Sohn and Rachel Lake. A focus of this walk was the flora of the region, so I got first looks at several common plants that I would see throughout the trip, from Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) (no pic?!) to Gambel Oak (Quercus gambelii) to Lewis Flax (Linum lewisii). Also picked up my first lifer, a bird that I would see often in Utah, Lazuli Bunting (Passerina amoena) (LAZB).

Rachel lumped all the sagebrush into Big Wyoming Sage; she said that there is an entire manual just for Artemisia ID.

There were reaches of the creek running through the canyon that were wet, but most of it was dry, as in the photo.

In the evening, Adam and Marzena Blundell led a short walk through Mountain Wilderness Park, ending at their home, fitted with a multitude of bird feeders. More LAZB, including a good look at a female.

Next day was a drive-stop-bird-repeat trip up Diamond Fork Canyon with leader Keeli Marvel. The canyon is in Utah County, southeast of Springville. I quickly caught on that everyone had a a different pronunciation of lazuli (Z or ZH, for instance), but less quickly that I have been pronouncing this word wrong for decades. Lewis’s Woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis), another western speciality; Canyon Wren (Catherpes mexicanus) at the top of the Red Ledges outcrop, with a voice that sounds like a ball bouncing downstairs; and a nifty butterfly, Sagebrush Checkerspot (Chlosyne acastus). It was nice to get some decent photos and audio of an east-west bird, Yellow-breasted Chat (Icteria virens).

Stephanie Greenwood took us through Springhill Geologic Park in North Salt Lake. This is a lemons-to-lemonade recovering natural space. One of the dirty little secrets I learned from this trip to Salt Lake is that the foothills are mined for Lake Bonneville gravel, with houses perched on the ridgeline above. The residents of this patch were not so lucky; a slow-moving landslide in the 90s ultimately dispatched about a dozen homes.

Song Sparrows here demonstrated some of their regional dialects; Mule Deer (Odocoileus hemionus) like suburbs as much as their congener White-taileds do; we saw lots of Arrowleaf Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata), which I would continue to see farther north; I found several very sluggish Obscure Darkling Beetles (Eleodes obscura), some of them showing unusual behavior: one was flopped over on its back as if dead, another showed a head-down posture.

jetty and vegwalking the lakebedSunday was my destination trip, a school bus ride (leaders: Max Malmquist and Jaimi Butler) (I sat in Scatlett’s seat) down the washboard road to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. The work is beached now, with the dusty pink water so special to Smithson a good half mile walk away. I packed for this trip prepared for bugs and sun, but on this day we got chilly wind and a bit of rain.

The area has been explored for petroleum, and there are scattered seeps of sticky tar that can catch wildlife unawares. Some opportunities for botanizing along the remains of the structures built to support the mineral exploration: a native wild rye, Squirreltail (Elymus elymoides).

yep, it's pinkWe reached the water! Salt concentrations run very high here (as a taste test confirmed); winds whip up the salt into ephemeral whitecaps. Catch a bit in your hand and give your fellow birder a Salt Lake high five!

Oh yes, birds. We stopped at the Golden Spike National Historical Park, where a Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) was tending near-fledglings—this is why you go with a guide. A fleeting look at Gray Partridge (Perdix perdix) from the vehicle—not many field marks visible in my grainy photos but what else could it be?

I got an even briefer look at another western specialty that I’m not going to count, and I missed MacGillivray’s Warbler (seen by others) on two trips.

Julie Metz Wetlands May 2026

Jenny's spotAnother visit to the Julie Metz Wetlands in Prince William County, this time with the Grass Bunch. Happy, abundant vegetation: here’s the view from J.’s favorite spot. Some fairly easy sedges, like Sallow Sedge (Carex lurida); an unexpected non-Tipula crane fly, Spectacled Crane Fly (Epiphragma solatrix).

Some of the paths through the wet areas are pretty janky: what I call Bring Your Own Boardwalk.

Potatoes

White people, who has the political educations of potatoes—lumpy, unseasoned, and biased toward the Irish—were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out against injustice. This happened every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.

—Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This (2021), pp. 33-34

At the park: 158

The latest update on nest box monitoring:

Ooh, lots of activity for the end of April! Four boxes have hatched (all of them off the main pond: #2, #10, #7, #6). For Box #2, I flushed the hen, who gave me a broken wing distraction display… because there were ducklings in the box! Camera snafu, so I was not able to get a photo.

Meanwhile, Box #13, which looked to have been abandoned with a single egg, is now incubating 14 eggs; Box #84 is a new nest, also incubating. We have five boxes incubating at this point.

For May, our work days will be 10 May and 24 May. We can make 10 May our last day to check all the boxes; on the 24th, we can spot check just those that are still incubating….

Scots Gaelic is in my Google Translate (I was checking a sus etymology): Tapadh leat!

The Minutes

As the US approaches the 250th anniversary of its independence declaration, Tracy Letts’ The Minutes takes a troubling look back at our complicated past—in the present case, through the blinkers of a tedious weekly meeting of a small town city council. Challenges are made, and met. As one character says, “History is a verb.”

If the ending of the play is a little over the top, nevertheless the playwright’s message is clear. However, a key argument of the debate is knocked over quickly with a smidgen of what-about-ism (perhaps to keep the piece at its 90-minute running time); one wishes for a deeper, more nuanced engagement with the issue.

Timothy H. Lynch as Mr. Oldfield adds a bit of comedy to the proceedings, as the council’s most senior member but no longer its most compos mentis.

  • The Minutes, by Tracy Letts, directed by Susan Marie Rhea, The Keegan Theatre, Washington

Thinking about this play from a more personal standpoint, I begin to wonder whether I am in the target audience for this play, or for that matter, something like The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa FastHorse, a much more facile work. Maybe I’ve already read enough David Treuer: I get it, already.

I was talking to a (younger than me, middle-aged) colleague some time ago, and we both expressed the feeling that much new theater these days has become, well, preachy. Mind you, I am still noticing new, challenging good work out there (e.g, The Great Privation, Soft Power). But maybe, now that I am in my legit crotchety years, the arc of my own moral universe has bent as far as it will go.

When you find yourself in danger

I’ve been rewatching episodes of Jay Ward’s Super Chicken on YouTube, in all their blurry transfer-from-video glory. Several of them are breaking-the-fourth-wall (-screen?) genius, and all are hilariously silly.

Super Chicken’s long-suffering majordomo/sidekick is Fred, who has a penchant for replying “Roger Wilcox” to Super Chicken’s directions. I wonder which comedic savant added the “x” to the well-known “Roger, Wilco”.

Anyway, I’ll do what I can to reintroduce Roger Wilcox into the world.

Pink

Pinxterbloom Azaleas1 [Rhododendron periclymenoides (Michx.) Shinners] are blooming here in Northern Virginia, along with their cultivated relatives. Hmm, another name puzzle to work out.

Let’s take the common name first: it’s more straightforward. Pinxter morphed from the Dutch Pinkster or Pinksteren, the feast of Pentecost (or Whitsunday, for folks in the UK). Pinkster is still celebrated in the US today, particularly among Black communities of New York-New Jersey, i.e., the lands colonized by the Dutch. See the African American Pinkster Committee of New York (aapcny).

This article in Dutch on Pinksterbloem (Cardamine pratensis), botanically unrelated, gave me some clues as to the etymology.

The Flora of Virginia gives March-May as the flowering time for Pinxterbloom Azalea, which more or less squares up with the possible dates for Pentecost, 50 days after Easter, 10 May to 13 June.

Now let’s look at the specific epithet, periclymenum. Readers may know that oides is a suffix that means “like, resembling, having the form of.” Michaux called this showy shrub Azalea periclymenoides, presumably due to its resemblance to Woodbine, or European Honeysuckle (Lonicera periclymenum)—he doesn’t give an etymology.2

And what does periclymenum mean? Here, the trail goes sketchy. Google Translate suggests “dangerous,” but that reading is not backed up by my Latin-English dictionary or Roland Wilbur Brown’s Composition of Scientific Words (1956).3 However, sources suggest that both Lonicera periclymenum and Rhododendron periclymenoides are toxic. In particular, honey made by bees feeding on Pinxterbloom Azalea is called “mad honey” and can cause grayanotoxin poisoning. So… maybe “dangerous.”

A final note: the scientific name for Pinxterbloom Azalea is a pileup of synonyms, eventually sorted out by Shinners in Castanea 27: 94-95, 1962. I haven’t been able to locate a copy of this paper online.

1Also called Pinxter-flower, Pink Azalea, and (in Vermont) Election-pink.

2He also reports that it can be found in New Jersey.

3Although I do see Clymenus as a cognomen of Pluto.

Some links: 112

Williamsburg midweek getaway

I put together a quick road trip to Williamsburg, anchored by a visit to the recently expanded Muscarelle Museum of Art on the William & Mary campus for its fine exhibition of women Abstract Expressionists.

After that, it was field trips:

  • to the tiny but mighty Williamsburg Botanical Garden: scoliid wasps and nomad bees spotted among the Golden Alexanders;
  • this way, pleasea short walk along the Basset Trace Nature Trail, carefully tended by the Virginia Master Naturalists Historic Rivers Chapter; oddly, you drive through Colonial Williamsburg and park next to a hotel building to get to the trailhead;
  • and on the way home, a stop at Westmoreland State Park on the lower Potomac: friendly rangers and a solitary Rattlesnakeweed (Hieracium venosum) that seems to be out of its vouchered range.

On the back roads of U.S. 17 and Virginia 3, I lost count of the number of Baptist churches, as well as yard signs urging YES or NO in the upcoming referendum [Narrator: David is against the measure].