At the park: 69

Wood Duck and Hooded Merganser trend chart

New York FernWe wrapped up the nesting season two weekends ago. The Wood Ducks bounced back after a couple of slower years. I’ve noticed a pattern recently: not only do the Hooded Mergansers get started earlier, but overall they tend to fledge a greater percentage of the eggs they lay—85% or better, seven of the last nine years. The Wood Ducks, on the other hand, are subject to dump/drop nests that don’t fledge anything. (One such nest a year is typical for us, out of 15 to 20 boxes being monitored.) In six of the same past nine years, our fledging rate for woodies has been 67% or lower.

White OakThe sanity-checker script at NestWatch is skeptical that we have mergs laying 14 eggs in a clutch, and laying as early as the last days of February. I invite the Lab scientists to come check the boxes for themselves.

fritI took a new camera with me to the park: it’s still a happy snap, but the optical zoom is better suited for quick shots of butterflies. The spangles on the underside of the hindwing of a Speyeria cybele are not usually the first thing you see, but they are diagnostic for ID.

New York snaps

the viewEvery once in a while, I get a look at New York that turns me into a happy-snapping, cornfed tourist. This view of SoHo, Tribeca, and the Financial District, with 1 World Trade Center in the background, taken from the sky level of the New Museum, is one such.


can't resistCan’t resist stopping for building-mounted street name signs. Bleecker Street, just down from the intersection with Carmine Street.


retrofit?I saw dispensers in two buildings encouraging the BYO water bottle idea: at New York Law School (filling stations from Filtrine), and here at the American Museum of Natural History.

Northwest Branch rock hop

for JaiOne of the simpler assignments for my current class in freshwater ecosystems was to visit the falls of the Northwest Branch (and have a picture taken to prove it).

This reach of the river is wild and urbanized at the same time. The trail is a short stumble down from a parking lot on Colesville Road. This is the site of Burnt Mills (ooh, the Internet Archive has an interesting book from 1931 about the history of the flour mill that was here). The riverborne trash is hard to overlook, and especially around the parking lot, the non-native invasive plants are pretty aggressive. Nevertheless, I found a few bits of Rattlesnake Weed (Hieracium venosum) growing around the rocks. Leta and I scrambled for a couple hundred yards downstream before turning back. I showed her an Acadian Flycatcher making sallies to a pool.

On the other side of Colesville Road, the river is held back by a dam and spillway. On this flat bit of trail, we found two Five-lined Skinks (Eumeces fasciatus): a juvenile with the familiar blue tail and a much-larger adult male with indistinguishable lines, orange-red in the head, and a truncated tail.

Leta chatted with one of the fishermen, who said that sometimes he took bream from the river. I think that we would know these as sunfish.

At the park: 68

Today’s report for nesting activity, abridged and annotated:

greened upbox 60A much greener park than 5 weeks ago, and most of our boxes have hatched! We have 8 (at least partially) successful nests, and one failed drop/dump nest in box #4. Box #13 was in the process of hatching when we got there; the Wood Duck hen flushed and showed a somewhat unexpected distraction display. We closed up the box quickly and backed off; we will get a shell count next time. Box #84 may also be in the process of hatching. Box #60, hatched out, at right.

In the vicinity of box #62, we had unaided eye views of a male Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotoria citrea), vocalizing “sweet-sweet” and checking out some natural holes in a snag. Of course, this the spot where we’d maintained warbler boxes for a few years–until this season.

box 62We’ll have another work day in June, to count #13 and #84 and two more boxes that haven’t yet hatched. Box #62, still unhatched, at left.

Water gauge reading: 1.64

homage to NewmanThis beaver-cropped Sweetgum tree reminds me of Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk. A lot.

Left Fork, Paint Branch

Our field trip for Jai Cole’s Freshwater Ecosystems class visited the Left Fork of the Paint Branch, on the site of the former Maydale Nature Center. The site is part of the Upper Paint Branch Special Protection Area, and the stream was the target of recently completed restoration work. We focused on the restoration work, and also performed a classroom exercise-level habitat assessment.

reconstructedThe centerpiece of the restoration is this 100-meter reach. You’re looking upstream and roughly northwest, standing on a bridge that provides access to the area. Out of frame to the right is a small parking lot. The point of the project was to replace a series of notched logs that channelled the stream as it drops from a weir (the flat water just visible in the background) (which maintains water supply for a pair of ponds on the property) and flows under the bridge; the problem with the logs was they they weren’t designed to allow fish passage. (Brown Trout is a naturalized breeder in the watershed.) The project replaced the logs with a series of arcing rock structures (called “cross-veins” in the local engineering parlance), each with a gentler drop and a plunge pool downstream. The pools give fish swimming upstream enough elbow room to get up speed to jump and surmount the rock barrier. Notice how the top of each arc of stones drops a few inches at the center: that’s where we want the most water to flow. A vertical plane through a watercourse passes through the point of maximum flow and the deepest part of the channel, which is called the thalweg, and in this case we want the thalweg to remain where it is.

weir and cross-veinFrom elsewhere on the stream, here’s a closeup (albeit with a lot of glare) of an arced cross-vein on the right and a straight-line weir on the left. Water flow is right to left, and the weir maintains the pool downstream of the cross-vein. Again, notice that, at this level of flow, the stones of the cross-vein near each bank are high and dry, and the stones in the center have the most flow over them.

Stony Man to Jewel Hollow

pale purpleStephanie Mason led another nature hike yesterday, this time at an elevation considerably higher than three weeks ago. We covered about 5 miles along the Appalachian Trail and side trails, from Stony Man to Jewel Hollow.

ooh shinyWe got some nice looks at high-elevation tree specialists for our region, like Balsam Fir (Abies balsamea), Red Spruce (Picea rubens), and the glossy-barked Yellow Birch (Betula alleghaniensis). Perhaps owing to the higher elevations around Stony Man (4011 feet), the Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) trees in this patch look pretty healthy and untouched by the adelgids.

Closer to the ground, spring ephemerals were abundant—Wild Pink, Moss Phlox, cinquefoil, bluets, many violets, Wood Anemone, waterleaf, Star Chickweed. I picked up one butterfly for my list, Falcate Orangetip (Anthocharis midea). Among the birds, the best was a bird from my “renewal” list of lifers that I haven’t seen in a long time: Veery (Catharus fuscescens). Good, multiple looks at Chestnut-sided Warbler (and we could point them out to a party of passing hikers) and American Redstart.

We climbed about 300 feet, then dropped down and ended about 300 feet below our starting point. We hit Stony Man early enough in the day (before noon) that the traffic was not too bad.

Spring at Calvert Cliffs

mioceneFrogging by ear tips, derived from yesterday’s walk to Calvert Cliffs on the Western Shore of Chesapeake Bay with Stephanie Mason: Gray Tree Frog (Hyla versicolor and H. chrysoscelis) sounds something like the ratchet on a retractable dog leash, while the irregular clicking sound of Cricket Frog (Acris sp.) resembles those annoying magnetic balls that my colleague Dylan likes to play with.

Once again, we saw elvers shimmying their way up Grays Creek. Eels (the young are elvers) are catadromous, that is they migrate downstream from fresh to salt water to breed then die, unlike the better known anadromous migrants (like salmon) that swim upstream to freshwater spawning grounds.

Also in the watercourse, we saw many Water Boatmen (Corixidae) sculling about.

Stephanie calls the 5-inch-long Fence Lizard (Sceloporus undulatus) our local iguana, since it is in the same superfamily as the big guys of the southwest.

baby leavesTrees were late leafing out (this is one of my favorite local species, Carpinus caroliniana, just opening up), so the birding was good. We heard or saw nearly three dozen species, and found two nests being built by Blue-gray Gnatcatchers (Polioptila caeruluea). The gnatcatchers showed some variety in vocalizations; one colloquy between two birds sounded like a couple of mockingbirds after too much espresso. My good bird was a fairly common species that I just don’t see very often, Yellow-throated Warbler (Dendroica dominica).

Spring wildflowers at Fraser Preserve

Margaret Chatham led a wildflower walk at the Nature Conservancy’s Fraser Preserve for VNPS. Spring Beauty was plenteous, but (as you would expect, given the everlasting winter we had) many bloomers were weeks behind schedule. Margaret showed us one example of Harbinger-of-Spring (Erigenia bulbosa) (very difficult to image properly); Purple Cress (Cardamine douglassii) was in various states of opening into flower; some Trout Lilies (Erythronium americanum) in a sheltered wet spot were in flower. But the Dutchman’s Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) and Cutleaf Toothwort (Cardamine concatenata) really hadn’t gotten started yet.

Down along the pipeline easement, the Poison Hemlock was nothing but basal leaves, nothing at all like the towering plant I saw just 49 weeks ago.

early later this yearWe found some early flying Spring Azure and Mourning Cloak butterflies. I was happy because we found three single Bloodroot blooms (Sanguinaria canadensis), widely scattered—this has been sort of a nemesis plant for me.

More shoebox emptying

In 1999, I had a consulting gig that took me to New York frequently. On my last trip up there (which turned out to be the week of Hurricane Floyd [have I told you the story about the clueless D.C. cab driver?]), a music festival had hoovered up all the hotel rooms in Manhattan, so I found myself in a place called the Pan American in Queens. The matchbook cover that I saved touts it as New York City’s Most Convenient Hotel. Uh, no.

namesakeGorsline streetscapeBut it turns out that this patch of Queens, still known as Newtown, must have been the place where great-ancestor Josse had his farm in the very early 1700s. Gorsline Street runs one block, from 51st Avenue to Kneeland Avenue. As you can see, it’s beautifully kept Archie Bunker territory; it could easily stand in for Hauser Street.

Another hurricane story. The night that Isabel came through town in 2003 (downgraded to a tropical storm by then, but you could have fooled me), the Norway maple that shaded the ground between my house and my neighbor’s thrashed and flailed and generally sounded as if it wanted to crawl in my bedroom window for shelter. Finally, a shattering crack rang out, and I think I heard somebody yell, “Holy cow, look at that!”

Isabel maple doorwayIsabel maple splitIn the morning, I saw what had happened. A good third of the tree was lying in my front yard. It crushed a lamppost and generally made for difficult navigation.

Isabel maple cleanupA cleanup crew promptly showed up and reduced the entire thing to a stump and chips. My townhouse cluster never has replaced the tree. The Morrissettian irony is that I had just given up on trying to grow flowers that liked sun under the maple, and had just planted a little shrub that liked shade.

Pedro y AlbertaIn 1998, I drove Alberta to Florida for some birding. On the way back, I stopped at South of the Border so that she could meet Pedro.

A mystery: 6

Girard Street?Why does the fire control panel in the lobby of 5225 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W. (where the D.C. Learning Ally studio is located) show “Girard Street” in place of Ingomar Street? “Girard” is a sore thumb in the sequence of the 3-syllable names for streets in this neighborhood (Ingomar is between Harrison and Jenifer).

There is a Girard Street in Washington, but it’s down in Columbia Heights, where it should be.

At the park: 66

Reports from the nest box team for the past two Sundays:

red washWe have evidence of roosting in 7 of the boxes, but at this point we have nests in only 2. Box #3 is incubating, so we can skip checking that one next week. With Steve’s help, we replaced box #6 this afternoon.

Notable birds for 9 March: Northern Pintail, Northern Shoveler, Gadwall, Green-winged Teal, Ring-necked Duck, Bufflehead, American Coot

We found a dead Barred Owl along Barnyard Run; we conveyed the specimen to park staff.

Notable birds for 16 March: Northern Pintail, Northern Shoveler, Gadwall, Green-winged Teal, Ring-necked Duck, Bufflehead, Hooded Merganser, Wood Duck, Eastern Bluebird, Eastern Phoebe, Tree Swallow (afternoon)

Water gauge readings: 1.86 (9 March), 1.50 (16 March)

Great Backyard Bird Count 2014

Great Backyard Bird Count 2014Much of the snow has melted and packed down, but much remains. The blacktop trail and stream are clear, but much of Lake Audubon is iced over. Hence my most numerous bird was not the $100 Jeopardy! answer, Canada Goose, but rather Red-winged Blackbird. I had reached the footbridge and was ready to turn around when one of the rather reliable Red-shouldered Hawks (Buteo lineatus) of these woods made an appearance.

Best bird of the day was a Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus) watering in a puddle of meltwater. A respectable 22+ species count. Bonus mammal: a Red Fox trotting across the frozen surface of the lake.