It’s a race between the District’s H Street/Benning Road streetcar line and Metro’s Silver Line as to which one will go into revenue service first. The streetcar looks to have the, um, inside track, with passengers riding perhaps at the end of the year. Martin Di Caro has video of a test run.
Battle Creek Cypress Swamp
We took a look at a freshwater swamp for our next wetlands field trip, co-led by Charles County staffer Katie Bradley. Battle Creek Cypress Swamp is known around the area as being one of the northernmost places where Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) can be found in large numbers. It’s suspected that the cypresses did well in this spot, rather than getting crowded out by shade-tolerant understory species, because farmers once grazed cattle here.
Much of the soggy spots were just that, with no standing or running water, but Battle Creek itself still showed some flow, as it made its way south to the Patuxent.
Katie also took us upland into a nice managed meadow along the access road (Grays Road) that I hadn’t seen on my previous visit.
Down in the bottomlands, we found Netted Chain Fern (Woodwardia areolata). I’m starting to get a handle on this one, and how it differs from Sensitive Fern. Both are lovers of boggy spots, and both have the non-fernlike wings along the rachis. This note from Flora of Virginia helps a lot:
When fruiting structures are not present, Woodwardia areolata is sometimes confused with Onocolea, but in W. areolata, the pinnae tend to be alternate (tending to be opposite in Onocolea) and acute or acuminate (vs. obtuse), with finely serrulate margins (vs. entire) (p. 156)
The fine serrations and the alternate pinnae are fairly clear in the above image. But I still need to be patient and spend more time looking for sori.
Stories I missed: 3
Just when I think that I have run out of indignant, that I am fresh out of appalled, I come across a story like this: In an effort to determine the precise whereabouts of Osama bin Laden (preparatory to the extrajudicial killing, assassination, whatever you want to call it, of this monstrous person), the Central Intelligence Agency put together a fake hepatitis B vaccination clinic and went about collecting DNA in the Abbottabad, Pakistan neighborhood where bin Laden was suspected to be holed up. As the editors of Scientific American put it,
It is hard enough to distribute, for example, polio vaccines to children in desperately poor, politically unstable regions that are rife with 10-year-old rumors that the medicine is a Western plot to sterilize girls—false assertions that have long since been repudiated by the Nigerian religious leaders who first promoted them. Now along come numerous credible reports of a vaccination campaign that is part of a CIA plot—one the U.S. has not denied.
The likely wages of this shameful sin is the stalling of global efforts to eradicate polio, as Donald G. McNeil, Jr.’s reporting for the New York Times suggests. A certain Dr. Shakil Afridi is identified as being in charge of the fake medical exercise. Instead of administering the full three doses of vaccine that are called for in the protocol, the ersatz humanitarians abandoned the setup after giving one dose to everyone in an entire neighborhood, without permission. Bad medicine, reprehensible spycraft, irresponsible policy.
Upcoming: 34
Michael Wines provides a fine update on two different research teams’ efforts to re-establish Castanea dentata to its pre-blight glory. Perhaps the best part of the piece is his concise explanation of the two different mechanisms for fending off Cryphonectria parasitica‘s attack on the chestnut.
Still, it’s too soon to tell whether the genetically modified trees or the Chinese hybrids will be successful.
“We’re only five years in the fields,” [Sara Fern Fitzsimmons of Pennsylvania State University] said. “You can’t really say anything much in forestry until age 15.”
Jug Bay Natural Area
Our first wetlands class field trip went to the Prince George’s side of Jug Bay on the Patuxent River. Greg Kearns of the park staff ran us up the river in a powered pontoon boat; he described the changes, good and bad, that he’s seen in the tidal wetlands over this 30-year career.
The re-establishment of Annual Wild Rice (Zizania aquatica) is due a decade of hard work by Kearns and his team: planting, spraying invasive Phragmites, building fences to exclude non-migratory Canada Goose (Branta canadensis), and other management activities regarding the geese (some call ’em flying cows). And the work has paid off. At left, the yellow-green band of veg in the midground, between the Spatterdock (Nuphar sp.) in the foreground and the gray-green Phragmites in the background, is Wild Rice. At right, you can see some of it coming into flower. This plant is a congener of the wild rice we eat, Z. palustris, harvested from the upper Midwest and Canada.
After the boat trip, a handful of us wandered down to the observation tower. We were surprised to find several good examples of Baldcypress (Taxodium distichum), especially since the feature of next week’s trip to Battle Creek Cypress Swamp is this same tree. Here’s an example that appears to be doing quite well.
Oh, yeah, and the place is crazy full of Osprey (Pandion haliaetus).
I bet the memorial service will be awesome
Jim Nayder, host of WBEZ-FM’s “Annoying Music Show,” has passed.
Decline of the West: 1
First it was the lights coming on at Wrigley Field, then the closing of Tower Records and Ollsson’s Books, and then the end of the zone system for D.C. taxicabs. We endured. But this blow is too much to take: the Metropolitan Museum of Art has discontinued its colorful admission buttons, replacing them with paper tickets, stickers—and advertising. A spokesman for the museum says that the the new paraphernalia will save the organization two cents apiece. Bah!
And Godzilla here was working on collecting a full set, hoping to score a free admission when his color came up again.
Not unlike some consultants I know
“Christ a-mighty, it’s hot, huh, kid?”
Clem Hoately, the talker, stood beside Stan, wiping the sweat from the band of his panama with a handkerchief. “Say, Stan, run over and get me a bottle of lemon soda from the juice joint. Here’s a dime; get yourself one too.”
When Stan came back with the cold bottles, Hoately tilted his gratefully. “Jesus, my throat’s sore as a bull’s ass in fly time.”
Stan drank the pop slowly. “Mr. Hoately?”
“Yeah, what?”
“How do you ever get a guy to geek? Or is this the only one? I mean, is a guy born that way—liking to bite the heads off chickens?”
Clem slowly closed one eye. “Let me tell you something, kid. In the carny world you don’t ask nothing. And you’ll get told no lies.”
“Okay. But did you just happen to find this fellow—doing—doing this somewhere behind a barn, and work up the act?”
Clem pushed back his hat. “I like you, kid. I like you a lot. And just for that I’m going to give you a treat. I’m not going to give you a boot in the ass, get it? That’s the treat.”
Stan grinned, his cool, bright blue eyes never leaving the older man’s face. Suddenly Hoately dropped his voice.
“Just because I’m your pal I ain’t going to crap you up. You want to know where geeks came from. Well, listen—you don’t find ’em. You make ’em.”
He let this sink in, but Stanton Carlisle never moved a muscle. “Okay. But how?”
Hoately grabbed the youth by the shirt front and drew him nearer. “Listen, kid. Do I have to draw you a damn blueprint? You pick up a guy and he ain’t a geek—he’s a drunk. A bottle-a-day booze fool. So you tell him like this: ‘I got a little job for you. It’s a temporary job. We got to get a new geek. So until we do you’ll put on the geek outfit and fake it.’ You tell him, ‘You don’t have do nothing. You’ll have a razor blade in your hand and when you pick up the chicken you give it a little nick with the blade and then make like you’re drinking the blood. Same with rats. The marks don’t know no different.'”
Hoately ran his eye up and down the midway, sizing up the crowd. He turned back to Stan. “Well, he does this for a week and you see to it that he gets his bottle regular and a place to sleep it off in. He likes this fine. This is what he thinks is heaven. So after a week you say to him like this, you say, ‘Well, I got to get me a real geek. You’re through.’ He scares up at this because nothing scares a real rummy like the chance of a dry spell and getting the horrors. He says, ‘What’s the matter? Ain’t I doing okay?’ So you say, ‘Like crap you’re doing okay. You can’t draw no crowd faking a geek. Turn in your outfit. You’re through.’ Then you walk away. He comes following you, begging for another chance and you say, ‘Okay. But after tonight out you go.’ But you give him his bottle.
“That night you drag out the lecture and lay it on thick. All the while you’re talking he’s thinking about sobering up and getting the crawling shakes. You give him time to think it over, while you’re talking. Then throw in the chicken. He’ll geek.”
—William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946), Card I, “The Fool”
Silver Line progress report: 30
Sand Box John keeps us up to date:
Wiehle-Reston East is mostly done. Finishing work was being done in the area of the south entrance pavilion, Reston Station Metro Comstock Partners property south of the station has begun work to ready their project accessible to the north pedestrian bridge.
Reading
Just as I act on stage “for fun,” and I’m reluctant to engage in paid work because of the baggage that comes with it, I’m perfectly happy to record textbooks on a volunteer basis. But I think it’s great that the growing audio books industry is keeping some professional actors afloat.
Entertainer’s Secret? Gotta get me some of that stuff.
Weird little marks
I use a lot of apostrophes. And usually, I use them according to standard practice. But sometimes you have to ask yourself, “what would happen if I didnt?” Faulkner, Selby, McCarty, and Kelman get along fairly well without most of them. Lucy Ferriss thinks we might be better off without the oft-misused mark.
And even if all the apostrophes in the world were vaporized tomorrow, it wouldnt solve all usage and punctuation peeves. Wed have more energy to focus on the teeming millions who seem to think that the second person nominative pronoun is spelled u.
One step at a time
State by state, a struggle is going on, one with a lower profile than the cause of marriage equality, but one that reflects more brightly our compassion as a people. Ever so gradually, capital punishment is being phased out, by legislative and judicial means.
If [death penalty abolitionists] can win in enough states, they’ll ultimately try to convince the Supreme Court that “evolving standards of decency” demand the death penalty be struck down as cruel and unusual punishment, [Robert] Blecker says.
That may not happen anytime soon.
But progress comes in increments. Colorado editorialists’ reluctance to seek blood revenge on accused Aurora shooter James Holmes is a favorable sign.
Stories I missed: 2
From April, a nice recap by Dan Charles of the many stickers and labels to be found on a virtuous bag of coffee.
Seeking native speakers
The Washington, D.C. studios of Learning Ally, where I have been recording textbooks for a number of years, handles foreign language texts in addition to English language materials. The studio has put the word out that it is specifically seeking volunteers with proficiency in any of the following languages:
- Khmer
- Polish
- Korean
- Tagalog
- Urdu
Do you speak one of these languages, and would you like to help? Do you know someone else who might be able to assist? Drop me a line, or contact the studio directly.
At the park: 61
Paul and I checked all the boxes last week and counted eggs for the remaining three nests. Swamp Rose (Rosa palustris) was in bloom, attended by various pollinators and other hangers-on.
The Hooded Mergansers continue to be more successful in our 16 boxes. We saw 7 clutches that were primarily merg, yielding 103 eggs, hatching 92. The Wood Ducks produced 6 clutches, laying 72 eggs but only hatching 48. Of the 13 total clutches, there were eggs of the other species in 4 of them. Our combined species total of 140 ducklings is the maximum over the 30-odd years that we have data for.
The two boxes that were relocated in preparation for the construction project (#77 and #6) were both successful. Box #13 had eggs
laid in it over a period of about 6 weeks, from 1 March to 13 April. In the end, 11 of the 14 eggs hatched.