photo – Page 22 – A Honey of an Anklet

At the park: 52

I made two trips to Huntley Meadows Park last weekend. On Sunday, I worked with the RMV team to plant (mostly) trees and shrubs (mostly) around the new outdoor classroom, just across the entrance trail from the visitors’ center. I planted two viburnums, two beeches, a blueberry bush, and a Christmas Fern.

Saturday I got an update from park staff on the planned wetland restoration project, which has been scheduled to start construction Real Soon Now for several seasons. The new plans call for a composite design for the dam, anchored by interlocking panels of vinyl sheet piling, with riprap on the downsteam face and a gentle earthen slope on the upstream face. This idea was suggested by National Wildlife Refuge managers, who know something about engineering water impoundments. To deceive the beavers (a beaver never met a course of running water that he didn’t want to dam), the design uses Clemson water levelers to collect the water that will flow through the structure.

Soil science word of the day: it’s the lean clay layer (clay with low plasticity) lying just under the surface that is responsible for keeping the wetland a wetland. If this layer were to be disrupted, it wouldn’t matter how clever the design of the dam was.

Postcards from Ohio: 6

Our last stop in the Dayton metro was at Oakwood High School, a rather fine institution from which I was graduated in 1974.

There is nothing new under the sun, and a young person with access to an automobile will find a way to use it for mischief. And so it came to pass in those days, that after an evening with my nerdy friends of playing Risk and usually intoxicated by nothing stronger than diet soda, we would find ourselves on the streets of this lovely, leafy suburb in my mother’s blue Austin America (an underpowered MG with a singularly peculiar suspension system).

And lo, the people saw that the faculty parking lot along the south side of the high school gave onto a sidewalk with no curb.

And my friends said, behold, the other end of this sidewalk ends with a curb cut on the Avenue of Schantz, near the playing fields. Let us rejoice in this attractive nuisance, and drive your vehicle from the parking lot directly into the Avenue of Schantz, without impediment.

And so it was done, and we drove the America down the sidewalk (think of Jason Bourne being chased through the streets of Paris in his Mini Cooper, but at vastly reduced speeds), and it was good.

That is, until some obstacle loomed on the passenger’s side and put a big crimp in the door. (Was it that big red oak that you can see in the first image? I seem to remember some sort of stanchion.) I achieved a new level of creative prevarication when I explained to my mother that the damage wasn’t my fault. (It was only last year, when she was zonked on hospital sedatives, that I came clean to my mother. But I think she’d figured it out a long time ago.)

Mom drove the America for another year or so, into my first year of college at least, until the hydrolastic suspension leaked and the car developed a severe list.

In any event, the sidewalk connection and the curb cut are still there, almost 40 years later. The ADA-compliant bumpy bits are the only change.

Postcards from Ohio: 5

We took a quick drive through Dayton on our way back home to D.C. I spotted this building-mounted street name sign in the Oregon district. Back in the 70s when I lived in the metro, the Oregon was ju-ust starting to be revived and redeveloped. That might have been the first time I hear the word “gentrification” (though perhaps it was when I arrived here and heard what was going on on Capitol Hill). At any, the neighborhood looks rather spruce these days.

Postcards from Ohio: 4

Leta and I walked around downtown Piqua on a quiet, somewhat chilly Saturday afternoon. We had coffee at a local ice-cream parlor, chatting with the proprietor; he said that much of his business was party catering out of a truck. I found a fallout shelter sign on the wall of the YMCA where I used to play bumper pool.

Evidence of the city’s milling and manufacturing past is still quite evident. This building is close to the river, just a few blocks down Main Street from what used to the the movie theater and is now a Hallmark store.

The centerpiece building of the downtown square, once the Orr-Statler Block and then the Fort Piqua Hotel (where the Greyhound buses would stop), is now the recently-restored Fort Piqua Plaza. The public library is the main tenant; I can’t turn up the story of how and why the library moved out of the Flesch mansion on Greene Street.

Postcards from Ohio: 3

We didn’t have as much time to explore Cincinnati as we had hoped, but we did make it to my first intended destination: the American Sign Museum, located in an industrial district between the Mill Creek expressway and the rail yards.

The strength of this place is its collection of neon and other lighted signs, but there are some fun non-electrified artifacts as well. This Big Boy adheres closely to the original design: three-dimensional slingshot in the back pocket, striped pants, saddle shoes, and a zaftig physique. You can also find some well-authenticated Burma Shave signs, not the dime-a-dozen reproductions.

The examples of neon on display are just stunning, and many of them in remarkably clean condition, especially considering the proprietor’s disposition against restoration work. Leta was extra fond of this tavern sign, at right.

This Crosley sign features a lateral lightning bolt that zings on and off, much too quick for my point and shoot.

Long before electronic ad rotators and carousels on web pages, before windowshade roller signs at the ballpark, these flip-down rotating ads were in service. No, there’s no such thing as progress.

Just a few blocks back toward the freeway, at Colerain Avenue and Hopple Street, we stopped for cheese coneys and chili at Camp Washington Chili, then back on the road!

Postcards from Ohio: 2

Fortified with gluten-free donuts, we set off south from Columbus to visit three Scioto Valley sites dedicated to preserving earthworks built by pre-European peoples. We talked a lot about the “mound builders” when I was going to school as a boy in Ohio, but I can’t recollect actually visiting any of the sites.

The first two were built by what we know as the Hopewell culture, Mound City, north of Chillicothe (first capital of Ohio)…

…and the Seip Earthworks, southwest of town. This section of a circular wall has been reconstructed; original or not, it’s impressive.

The orderly groundskeeping by the NPS makes you wonder what the Hopewell did to keep these enclosing ceremonial walls tidy. Certainly they didn’t have access to golf course fescue for planting.

We continued southwest, and after recovering from a wrong turn in the town of Bainbridge and chasing the setting sun, we proceeded to Serpent Mound, near Peebles. Current scholarship now attributes this work to the Fort Ancient people. The two approaches could not be more different. Where the Hopewell sites are geometric and situated on level ground, the Fort Ancient construction is organic, undulating along a ridgetop. It reminds me of Andy Goldsworthy’s wall at Storm King. The one thing the sites have in common is proximity to a watercourse.

No more elephant hunting

Last week I donated Alberta, my venerable Ford Explorer, to one of my local public radio stations. She and I had a good run: we traveled (usually on birding/hiking trips) to Louisiana, Key West, Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks, twice to the beaches of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Cape May, several trips to Delmarva. She carried set pieces to a theater competition in Geneva, N.Y.; we took Mom birding in southeastern Indiana; during nesting season, my waders were always in the cargo area.

The biggest body damage she sustained was a scrape in the driver’s side rear fender: I ran into a support column in an otherwise empty parking structure in Vienna. Another time, a driver banged into her in Falls Church, but he nosed down and hit her square in the hub cap: you can’t see the damage at all.

It was the multiple trips to the shop that did her in: she was on her third transmission; we repaired the brakes last October only to have them fail again in May. But we still got past 200K miles before Della came on the scene, and we finished up with 208469.4. I will miss her.

Postcards from Ohio: 1

Leta and I took a quick road trip to Ohio last week. First stop was Bexley in the Columbus suburbs to visit friends. On our way out of town we stopped at the Cherbourg Bakery, which makes an excellent line of tasty treats, all of them gluten-free and Leta-friendly.

Next to our parking space on Main Street, we found a mileage marker from the original National Road. We had covered the 254 miles from Cumberland much more quickly than those who traveled before us. Distances from Wheeling, to the east, and nearby Columbus, just 3-1/2 miles to the west, are somewhat legible in this image. (Point and shoots don’t do well with inscribed stone.)

Silver Line progress report: 26

It’s been a while since I photographed the construction site at the future Wiehle Avenue (temporary) terminal. The building definitely resembles a station at this point. See how nice and clean all that gravel ballast is.

Work for the pedestrian overpasses is also progressing nicely, and the canopy over the west end of the platform is in place.

Cape May fallout

Almost ideal weather conditions (Friday’s passing cold front with storms, Saturday’s northwest winds) set up a great weekend birding in Cape May with a group led by Mark Garland. Warbler migrants were numerous (15 species for my count, including my darling Black-throated Blue and Black-throated Green). In the afternoons, we worked the neighborhood streets around Lily Lake. An insect hatch in the elm trees caused them to “turn on,” in Mark’s words. A brilliantly yellow Prairie Warbler; a crazy weekend for Red-breasted Nuthatches (Sitta canadensis).

Falcons and accipiters were also plentiful (ID mnemonic: the tail of a Sharp-shinned Hawk is sharply cut off, while a Cooper’s tail is rounded) , and easier to see from the west side of Cape May Point than from the official watch station in Cape May State Park. A trio of Brant in Delaware Bay was a small surprise. Mark called the goldenrod thriving in this windblown habitat Beach Goldenrod (other sources call it Seaside Goldenrod) (Solidago sempervirens).

Sunday morning at Higbee Beach we were seeing half a dozen Northern Flickers at a time. Higbee runs north-south along the bay side of the peninsula. Mark explained an early-morning phenomenon that I didn’t understand the first time I visited Cape May, in 1998. As the sun comes up, a passerine (migrating by night) that finds itself over Delaware Bay takes the strategy “water! go back the way you came!” So at sunrise you will see birds flying back north over Higbee, looking for a dry spot to land.

Monarch butterflies were also in migration, a steady stream all weekend. The flicker of a butterfly was always catching my eye, making me think that I’d spotted a bird. I added Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia) to my very short butterfly list.

Everyone came scrambling to see the Say’s Phoebe (Sayornis saya) in the park east of the lighthouse. I’ve seen this bird in the west, so I got my look and then went elsewhere: there had been reports of Clay-colored Sparrow in the brush along the back of the dunes, and some of our group got a brief look, but I did not succeed.

80 species for the weekend, plus good looks at several Cape May Warblers for a life list twitch.

Mark’s suggestion paid off: Westside Market on Broadway is a good place to get a sandwich and Krimpets for lunch. If you’d like a split of wine to go with dinner (many of the restaurants are BYOB), Collier’s is the place to go.

I like the funky nouveau street name signs in Cape May City. And the hand-painted sign at my motel (a mom and pop operation now converted to a chain’s branding) was very cute.

Aisle of View

Sunday we walked the property of VNPS Pocahontas Chapter President Catharine Tucker in Hanover County. Her 70 acres have seen little farming disturbance over the last 150 years, and hence are one of our better representatives of mesic hardwood forest in the upper Coastal Plain. The fall zone runs through Richmond, and this part of Hanover County is northeast of Richmond.

On the state road leading to her land, Catharine pointed out Red Morning-Glory, or Redstar (Ipomoea coccinea) growing in a hedge managed for butterflies. There seems to be some question as to whether Ipomoea is native to this part of the country.

Catharine effectively used the subsiding road cut to illustrate the soil profile: a sandy horizon lying atop red clays.

The bulk of the property is a Beech-Tuliptree forest, with some magnificent examples of Fagus grandifolia. Our group measured around one tree, computing a DBH of 110 cm. And with beeches come the parasitic Beechdrops (Epifagus virginiana)—plentiful here, but difficult to photograph with a point-and-shoot.

Our destination plant was Shining Clubmoss (Huperzia lucidula), found in one small clump at the base of a tree. This fern ally is kin to the more often-seen Lycopodium ground pines.

Bonus local common name: Catharine calls Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) May Pops—although Google thinks that this name goes better with Passiflora incarnata.

VCU Rice Center

For my first field trip as part of the Virginia Native Plant Society’s annual meeting, we visited the Virginia Commonwealth University Inger and Walter Rice Center for Environmental Life Sciences in Charles City County. The botanizing was what it was, but the education and lab facility was a stunner.

VCU acquired the property, on a bluff with a majestic view of the James River, via a gift from Walter Rice’s widow, Inger. She then went on to specify (and fund!) a state-of-the-art sustainably-built edifice. Panelled in American White-cedar, the building has achieved LEED platinum certification. Early plans called for solar panels on the roof, but they would have been shadowed by the huge oak that provides the shade in this image. So the panels were relocated to the research pier at the bottom of the bluff.

Vertical geothermal tubes provide some of the heating and cooling. I was surprised to learn that the permeable paving system for the entrance drive and parking area (a plastic grid over layers of sand and gravel) was one of the more expensive elements, blowing out the original $2M budget for the entire package.

The south-facing conference hall is naturally lit and ventilated. Knee-height casement windows are supplemented with industrial-strength ceiling fans, keeping temps in the room very comfortable (albeit on a breezy early fall day).

As we talked outside, our presenters were upstaged by a pair of chippering Bald Eagles, their arrival announced by an unhappy Blue Jay.

Along with research into Eastern Box Turtles and Prothonotary Warblers, the Center is in the midst of a wetland restoration project—one that was prompted by Nature herself. Kimages Creek, just to the east of the educattion building, was dammed in the 1920s by a real estate developer who sought to establish a hunting club. Although he busted almost immediately, the dam remained for the time being, impounding a body of water called Charles Lake (it’s still labelled as such on Yahoo!’s maps). The earthen dam, never well-maintained, was eventually breached by storms in the 2000s. Efforts are now underway to re-establish the tidal freshwater creek.

Land use in the area is exceptionally well-documented and mapped, owing to the place’s strategic importance during the American Civil War. Gen. George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac was encamped on the eastern side of Kimages Creek for a short period of time in 1862.

Happens to us all

The Supreme Court’s building on 1st Street, N.E., gets a temporary wrapper.

Enroute: 2

A few ironweed (Vernonia sp.) plants are blooming in the Ridge Heights meadow.

Red roadster

Leta and I spotted this polyethylene-bodied Th!nk City electric vehicle getting a drink of juice in a local parking garage. The manufacturer has gone bankrupt four times in twenty years, but Electric Mobility Solutions AS has plans to restart production soon. Most of the U.S. production was to the state of Indiana for government fleet use. What’s this one doing in Silver Spring?