Slippers

“Long Island Sound is slipper shell soup.” said my friend as we walked the beach at Milford, Connecticut. Judging from the windrows of shells cast up by the tide; 90% of which were slipper shells, she looked to be spot-on correct.


The world is full of animals (and a few plants) busy earning a living pretending to be something else. A cheetah is a cat pretending to be a dog; a grey fox is a dog pretending to be a cat. Slipper shells are snails pretending to be oysters. They are also girls pretending to be boys, but more on that later.

The Atlantic slipper shell (Crepidula fornicata) is one of the most common shells you can find on any eastern beach in North America, with a few Eastern white slipper shells (Crepidula plana) tossed in just make things confusing. They get their name from the shelf or deck on the inside, which makes them resemble shapeless slippers that have been under the bed for years. The deck extends about a third the length of the shell and serves as an anchor and protection for the internal organs. The Atlantic slipper shell is arched with brown markings with the tip bent downward to one side at the back. It is up to an inch and a half long. The Eastern white slipper shell is white and flattened, sometimes a little convex or concave, and generally a bit smaller. Eastern white slippers seem to prefer the inside of old shells and the underside of old horseshoe crabs.

Eggs are brooded within the female’s shell until they develop into exact miniatures of the adult. Periodically, females lift their shells and push the juveniles out into the cold briny deep. Newly hatched young sink to the bottom, where they scrape algae from hard substrate until they settle down in the shallows. Like oyster larvae or spat, slipper shell babies set on anything hard; rocks, shells, horseshoe crabs, each other.

Once a juvenile sets, it attaches with its muscular foot and remains in the same place forever. It has functionally become an oyster - immobile and filter feeding on the microscopic algae and detritus suspended in the water. Oysters have had gazillions of years practicing filter feeding and have evolved an elegantly simple way of moving large volumes of water past their gills, which rake out food particles and pass them to the gut. It has been said that prior to the European invasion, the entire volume of Chesapeake Bay went through an oyster every three days or so. Slipper shells aren’t quite so efficient. Descended from grazing snails that use a tongue-like organ called a radula to rasp algae off rocks, they have come up with a whole new way of getting food. Mucus is secreted from specialized organs located in the mantle and just in front of the gills; the gills sweep in plankton and other particles that stick to the mucus, and the creature uses its radula to lick the whole thing up and pass it to the stomach. Not a dinner guest who would cause you to break out the good china, but it works well enough to get by.

A slipper shell needs a hard surface on which to live; they live in an environment where this critical resource is scarce and scattered. When a slipper finds a hard surface to colonize, be it a rock, piling, shell, or horseshoe crab, other young slippers are attracted to it. Slippers tend to form piles, with the oldest and biggest on the bottom, the youngest and smallest on the top. Piles can be up to ten shells deep.

Slippers are sequential hermaphrodites. The oldest and biggest is the functional female, the smallest and youngest is the functional male. The animal in between are in various stages of transition from male to female. Female is the fallback gender. When a young slipper colonizes a new surface, it becomes female and releases a pheromone to prevent others from following suite. When the female on the bottom of a stack dies, the next one up becomes female and begins to produce pheromone and eggs.

Hermaphrodism occurs throughout the animal kingdom wherever you get a sedentary species with scattered resources. The familiar orange and white clown fish is just such a species. Clown fish colonize sea anemones. Anemones possess tentacles armed with stinging cells and can capture and devour prey up to and including clown fish size. Clown fish secrete a mucus which the sea anemone chemically recognizes as itself, and which protects the clown fish. Anemones are relatively scattered along the bottom in reef environments, and are the critical resource required by the clown fish. Clown fish form groups living around and defending individual anemones. The biggest and oldest clown fish is the functional female, the next biggest, the male. The rest wait their turn. If the female dies or falls to a predator, the male becomes female and the next biggest clown fish becomes the male. Everybody moves up a notch in the hierarchy. Try explaining the movie Finding Nemo in that context. When little Nemo’s mommy and siblings are eaten by the big bad barracuda, Nemo’s daddy should become Nemo’s new mommy, and little Nemo becomes the new daddy…things go weird from there.

For all that they are mucus-eating, bisexual hermaphroditic snails pretending to be oysters, slipper shells are the most common shell on any beach from Florida to Maine. They must be doing something right.

Starry Messenger

The other night, Alec called from school. He has been pretty much incommunicado this semester, so a phone call was an occasion for some concern. Turns out he was headed back to his dorm after Marching Band practice after dark, when he happened upon the school’s astronomy club. He stopped by to chat, and was shown Comet Holmes. The club members pointed out the location for naked eye viewing and gave him a look through a telescope. He was excited and his first impulse, like ET, was to phone home.

Comet Holmes was discovered in November 1892 by (you guessed it) Mr. Edwin Holmes, a British astronomer. His namesake comet orbits the Sun once every seven years at a distance of about 200 million miles (a little over twice Earth's 93-million-mile orbit). It was re-observed in 1899 and 1906 before being lost for nearly six decades. Based on a prediction from calculations, the comet was found again in 1964.

It is a local (relatively speaking) object, reaching its farthest distance from the sun somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Every seven years it makes the round trip, and has been doing so for who knows how long. What makes this comet remarkable; a once in a lifetime viewing as some authorities have dubbed it, is that it periodically “erupts”. Normally a magnitude 17 object, only visible with a pretty powerful scope, it blossoms to a magnitude 3 object every 100 years or so. Magnitude 3 means it becomes as bright any star and is easily visible to the naked eye. On October 20, in less than 24 hours, it brightened by a factor of nearly 400,000 and has now up to a factor of over a million times what it was before the outburst. This is a change "absolutely unprecedented in the annals of cometary astronomy." The comet is now rivaling some of the brighter stars in the sky. When it first cooked off, some observers thought they were witnessing a super nova – an exploding star. A super nova was last seen in the galactic neighborhood around the time of Keppler and Tycho Brahe.

Theories abound as to why Holmes brightened up ("elementary Watson"--sorry, I couldn't resist), but as yet, no one has come up with anything definitive or remotely plausible. For all we know, Scottie just turned on the warp drive engines. What is amazing is that Holmes made its closest approach to the sun last May and came no closer than 190 million miles to the sun. The comet is now moving away from the sun, boggieing its way back to Jupiter. Not exactly a recipe for the typical show-off Great (notice the initial caps) comet. None the less, there it is, in the constellation Perseus.

You can see Holmes' comet almost any time this fall until it fades, when that will be is anybody's guess since we don't know how it got bright to start with. Some astronomers predict it will grow to rival the full moon in size. Go outside and find the constellation Cassiopeia. That’s the one in the North-east sky that looks like the number “3” as drawn by a first grader. (Tilt you head right and it looks like an “M”, tilt left and it’s a “W”). Find the bottom star in the group and look at about 5 o’clock. You will see a bright star in the Perseus, with a somewhat brighter star about 5 o’clock from it. This star is the top of a triangle. The bottom left star of the triangle is Comet Holmes. Look at it carefully and you will notice it is fuzzy around the edges. Binoculars bring this out even better. I set up my 20x spotting scope on the back deck and even with this relatively puny optics, I was able to see a star shining through the fuzz and the hint of a denser area in the center; the nucleus itself. Way cool.

A well-known astronomer once remarked: “Comets are like cats; they both have tails and they both go where they please.” If that is the case, then Comet 17P/Holmes must be of the Manx variety. Unlike some the so-called Great Comets (Haley on most occasions in the past thousand years, or Halle-Bop from a few years ago), Holmes does not possess a tail to speak of. Most comets can be described as “dirty snowballs,” consisting mostly of ice with chunks of rock embedded in. It may be that Holmes, with its seven-year run, has had most of the ice already ablated off the nucleus and is pretty much solid rock…or not. Like cats, comets are pretty much inscrutable.

Nauset

The light at Nauset is hard by the Town of Eastham. It is more famous than other lighthouses on Cape Cod; the red and white tower is the logo for Cape Cod Potato Chips, sold in every convenience store from Connecticut to Maine.



Pat and I climbed down the wooden steps to the narrow beach where we set up chairs and the all-important umbrella. Pat took off her sandals, dipped a toe in the water, pronounced it freezing, and ensconced herself with cool drinks, and a new mystery novel in the shade of the umbrella to enjoy the beach in her own inimitable fashion. I can’t sit still on a beach and took off back up the stairs to explore the lighthouse and environs.

Cape Cod has always had a problem with its lighthouses. The coastal cliff that (technically a glacial scarp) forms a rampart against the ocean affords a free additional fifty feet or so of elevation at Eastham, but the remorseless Atlantic nibbles away at the cliff base with every wave and every storm, and the edge keeps moving ever westward and closer to the light. Every lighthouse facing the open sea is a replacement--sometimes second or third generation--of a light that went over the lip when its feet were cut out from under it.

The current Nauset lighthouse was built in 1877 as one of the “Chatham Twins”- old postcards show the keeper’s house flanked by identical fifty-foot tall white lighthouses. The right-hand tower was dismantled in 1923 and moved by barge up the coast to the cliffs, where it replaced the last of the “Three Sisters” lights. The Sisters were themselves wooden replacements for the three original brick towers, built in 1838, when the cliff stood about 800 feet further east. The last of the brick sisters slid over in 1892-what's left of the foundations are visible at extreme low tide. The “new” Nauset Lighthouse was operated by the Coast Guard until 1955, when it was sold out of service. The owner donated the light and the grounds to the National Park Service to be a part of Cape Cod National Seashore. That seashore kept moving closer to the base until, by 1996, the cliff edge was only 25 feet from the base of the tower. The light was moved 100 yards inland, waiting for the ocean to catch up with it. Nauset Lighthouse is run by the Nauset Light Preservation Society, who keep up the maintenance and do restoration, operating the light as a “private aid to navigation”. Boaters and fisherfolk use the red and white tower as a day mark and the alternating red and white aerobeacon lights can be seen up to 20 miles at sea.



The day we were there, Nauset Beach had more that its share of surfers, most on long boards, a good number sporting grey in their beards, and all but one in full wetsuits. Long boards handle better than hot dog boards on the small waves sloshing ashore. The waves were smallish but well formed and a surfer usually had the choice of left or right breaks. Long boards give a stable smooth ride and can better take bumps with rocks as well. The beach was littered with rocks from football to chair size; dumped there by the last glacier and eroding out of the cliff face when the glacier retreated (gone back, as the locals say, for more rocks). A pair of surfers were standing up on wide Hawaiian-style paddle boards, looking like gondoliers in wetsuits with their long single oar, and were catching more curls than most.



When I was fifteen or so, I happened upon a book entitled The Outermost House by Henry Beston. I still have it; pages yellowed and corners folded, the 95 cent price tag still in the corner. Beston, a burnt-out magazine editor and bon vivant built a two-room vacation shack on the dunes at Nauset Beach and found himself unable to leave one September. Beston spent a year on Nauset Beach, recording his experiences and thoughts in longhand on a kitchen table. He wrote of storms and shipwrecks, bird migrations and fishermen. His few visitors were mostly Coast Guardsmen from the local station or the lighthouse. Beston always offered them coffee, or something a bit stronger, on winter nights. I can still remember long quotes from the book, some passages, like long-ago memorized poetry stick in my mind. It would have been nice to have visited the house, which was dedicated as a "National Literary Landmark" in 1964 by the then Secretary of the Interior, but the house was demolished by a howling Northeaster (the lady in the local bookstore called it hurricane)in 1978. The foundation and the commemorative plaque are gone as well, the beach and dunes changed, the cliffs pushed back by the constant waves and the patient sea.

Private Viewing

Sometimes I feel as if I’m the only one around paying attention. I was walking around dusk in Old Town Alexandria a couple of weeks ago, when my attention was drawn by a chittering overhead. The sound came from a flock of chimney swifts wheeling around the unused smoke stack at the old Courthouse Building on Washington Street. Having raised their babies, and prior to migration for the rain forests of the upper Amazon, swifts spend the rest of the summer feeding on the wing and forming communal roosts in (guess where) chimneys. Before the European invasion of the Americas, chimney swifts roosted in standing hollow trees, but chimneys are even better and it is rare to find them in hollow trees anymore. The wheel in the sky grew as more swifts joined and the sound level intensified. I like to think they were swapping stories of where the best spots are for the tastiest bugs and about the one that got away.

Roger Tory Peterson in his Field Guide to Birds East of the Rockies, describes swifts as "a cigar with wings". Swifts are related to hummingbirds and move their wings almost as fast. Rather than the blur you see with hummers, swifts seem to flap their wings alternately; it's just an optical illusion from the rapidity of movement; your brain interprets it as alternate movements. Swifts have tiny feet; early biologist who should have known better, thought the feet were missing altogether, leading to the group name Apodidae (no feet). Their small feet and weak toes leave swifts unable to perch on a horizontal surface as do other birds. Chimney swifts prefer to find a rough vertical surface and hook their claws into some irregularity and roost like upside down bats.

The wheel reached out to half a block in size, and it seemed as if every swift in Alexandria was circling the chimney and chattering up a storm. At some point, known only to the birds, critical mass was reached and the entire mass spiraled down the chimney like smoke going backwards. It was like some sort of magic trick, which I guess that’s really what it was. From the first circling birds to empty sky, the whole show was over in less than five minutes. The truly amazing thing was that, as I stood there, agog in astonishment at being privileged to see such a spectacle, nobody else along that busy street even bothered to look up. I mumbled a thanks for the show to Whoever might be listening, and rejoined the throng, hurrying towards my destination of the evening.

Chatham; Hammerheads and Horseheads

Pat and I spent a long weekend on Cape Cod. Rather than go through a blow by blow, I am doing a series of vignettes interspersed with the usual stuff. Intro done, we commence.

Chatham Lighthouse sits about a mile down Main Street, just outside of Chatham, Massachusetts. It perches on a cliff overlooking the approaches to Chatham harbor. The light was built in 1881; one of a set of twin lighthouses, and part of the third set of twin lighthouses in Chatham. The original lights, as well as their replacements, slid into the ocean as the cliff slowly eroded away. In 1923, one light was moved up-cape to Nauset to replace a set of aging triple lights. Chatham light was taken over by the Coast Guard in 1939 and is still an active Coast Guard station.


Coasties were known on the Cape as Hammerheads. They got the name from an elite military unit set up during the days of Prohibition. Hammerheads went after rumrunners smuggling liquor from Canada, smashing contraband whiskey barrels with sledge hammers and spilling the contents overboard, much to the delight of the local lobster population.

Pat and I drove to the lighthouse after a leisurely stroll through the town. We were taking in the view from the cliff top and contemplating a trudge down the wooden stairs to the beach when a couple came past and asked if we had seen the seals. Really? Where? They had lunched up the road and had seen seals sporting in the channel. I scanned the area with my binoculars and came up with nothing. Then I checked out the tiny island off the point. No bigger than a sandbar, it looked covered with logs. Which moved. Eureka. I dug out the 20x spotting scope that Pat had me bring along (thanks, Pat) and focused in. The sandbar was wall-to-wall seals. Gray seals the size of sofa beds along with smaller, lighter harbor seals lay cheek by jowl on the beach looking for all the world like a crowd of summer sunbathers. I half expected them to be passing the Coppertone. I decided to hike out to the point to see if I could get some pictures. Pat elected to stay on the cliff top with the scope. She asked anyone who passed by if they wanted to see the seals; most people were blase about it until they got their eye to the lens. When I got to the bottom of the stairs and looked back up, Pat was doing a land-office business - she could have sold tickets. Pat says she didn't offer a look to the bikers who roared up soon after I left. Too bad, she could have swapped a view of the seals for some free legal or accounting advice.


Local fishermen call Gray seals “horseheads” from their long rounded heads that poke out of the water to stare at you with huge soulful puppy eyes.


Grays and the smaller harbor seals have ballooned in population in the past 30 years until their numbers are approaching 6000 along the Cape. With the increase in the seal populations, have come (cue up scary music here…Da Dum…Da Dum..) their major predator, the Great White Shark. There have been reports of shark attacks on seals off Chatham for several years and the occasional seal carcass washes up showing half-moon bite marks the diameter of garbage can lids. A Great White, estimated to be 14 feet long, was observed killing and eating a seal just off the beach not 2 months ago. Chatham Town has issued an “advisory” telling people not to swim with seals. It seems to me that swimming with an animal possessing a head the size of a grizzly bear’s with teeth to match, is only slightly less foolhardy than swimming with an animal possessing a head the size of a grizzly bear’s with teeth to match AND knowing that something with the firepower to eat it may be nearby. The good news is that Great Whites rarely attack humans; when they do, it is usually a case of mistaken identity - a swimmer or surfer on a board looks an awful lot like a seal on the surface. Seals have a thick layer of blubber (read: calories) that the shark can detect when it hits. Humans are too skinny and not worth the effort to digest; a shark will spit you (or whatever part of you it took off) back out. The bad news is that the first bite is enough to ruin your day.

Pat and I drove back to the lighthouse in the evening after a good seafood dinner in a local restaurant. Chatham Light sent its double beams out into a clear black night, broken only by the lights of passing cars on the main road. The Milky Way was visible, with the Pleiades hovering, and Orion climbing over the horizon like a fat man getting out of the tub. The cries of migrating shorebirds punctuated the darkness over the empty beach with summer past and a north wind rising.

Far Travelers

Saturday morning Pat and I saw a sight few people witness; Freshwater jellyfish in the pond at Locust Shade Park in Prince William County, Virginia. Scattered far and wide, freshwater jellyfish have been found on every continent except Antarctica and on many oceanic islands including Guam and New Zealand. They are not particularly rare, but like the pookah in Harvey, they "appear here and there, now and then, to this one and that one (and how are you Mr. Wilson?)". Freshwater jellyfish may show up in a pond one year and not be seen again for the next twenty, if ever, although they have been reported from the pond at Locust Shade for the past three years. A big reason that few people see them is that almost nobody looks. Freshwater jellyfish are not very high on the average person's list of things to see. Craspedacusta sowerbii, although not a true jellyfish, is close enough so as to make no difference; a few slight anatomical differences put freshwater jellyfish in the same group as hydras (tiny stalked critters resembling miniature sea anemones). However, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck...Actually freshwater jellyfish don't quack or walk and they don't swim like duck either, but you get the point.

These are interesting little blobs of protoplasm. They swim, like their saltwater cousins, by pulsating the bell and trailing their tentacles to pick up small plankton such as water fleas and daphnia. Stinging cells on the tentacles kill prey which the tentacles pass up to the mouth for digestion. The stinging cells on freshwater jellies are too small to penetrate human skin, so if you really wanted to, you could pick one up with impunity. Like sea nettles, fifty miles east in Chesapeake Bay, freshwater jellyfish are 90% water. They have an inside layer of cells and an outside layer of cells and in between, they contain gelatinous mesoglea (jelly) which gives them buoyancy. Since they are basically animated water, jellies are nearly clear with an X-shaped set of gonads standing out in white. The biggest ones are about the size of a quarter, with nickel-sized specimens far more common. Pat described them as "swimming edelweiss".

Freshwater jellyfish undergo alternating generations. Colonies of polyps, the stalked form, grow on the bottom, reproducing by branching off clones. The freshwater jellyfish part, or medusa, is the sexual generation, produced by the polyp under favorable conditions. The polyp clones several copies, stacked up like saucers, each of which separates off swims away. Once the medusae release eggs and sperm, they die. In winter, polyps go into a resting state, called the podocyst, which withstands cold. These resting cysts are picked up on bird feet and feathers and move from pond to pond, a few miles at a time, until freshwater jellyfish are found all over the world. Podocysts jump across oceans probably by hitching a ride long-distance migrants which can traverse whole hemispheres. Being a clone species has advantages; the same species of freshwater jellyfish is worldwide and is therefore unlikely to become rare. On the other hand, the medusa stage seldom bears fruit, since all the freshwater jellyfish in a pond are likely descended from a single podocyst and the medusae are all males or all females. Only when podocysts are from different ponds, of different sexes, and both clones manage to survive to the medusa stage, do genes get mixed.

Some researchers postulate that jellyfish represent an early "experiment" of life, unrelated to anything else. Indeed, fossils of jellyfish-like creatures show up in some of the oldest rocks with any traces of life. Called the Edicaran fauna (after some god-forsaken spot in the middle of the Australian outback), they were thought by some to show no affinities to any other known life forms although recent research seems to disprove this theory.

Jellyfish have always seemed to me to be too ethereal to be real (except when I get stung). Maybe it's the ghostly coloring and the unhurried pulsating swimming that makes them seem as if they really are not of this earth. Indeed, the late Carl Sagan, in speculating on possible life forms that could exist in the thick clouds of Jupiter, used jellyfish as a model. He never mentioned if they got there on bird feet.

Paw Paws

I was walking the banks of the Potomac on a warm late summer Saturday morning, looking for dragonflies and assorted other targets of opportunity to photograph. As I rounded a bend in the trail, I suddenly had a mental flash of "Juicy Fruit", as in the gum. They say the sense of smell taps into your deepest memories and creates the strongest associations. So why was I thinking of a chewing gum that I haven't even cared for since I was a kid? A short bit of looking turned up a forest floor littered with ripe paw paw fruits. Paw paws are middling-sized understory trees, usually found on the rich flood plains of streams and rivers. They have large leaves, always in threes, and the flowers in early May look like those of wild ginger, even though the two plants are not remotely related.


Paw paws are the northern representative of what is a huge tropical family of trees, including the tropical custard apple, which my old economic botany text book calls "the queen of tropical fruits".


Paw paws are loaded with aromatics; crush a leaf and you smell green peppers. Cut open a ripe fruit and you get a whiff of sweet potato and banana. The taste is the same; sounds kind of ghastly, but is surprisingly good on the pallate. Just make sure the fruit is fully ripe - green ones can be mouth puckeringly astringent. Paw paw leaves are the only food plant for caterpillars of the zebra swallowtail butterfly, and the Potomac valley is well known among lepidopterists as the best place to see this hauntingly beautiful species.


The late Euell Gibons, in his Stalking the Wild Asparagus, gives a recipe for paw paw chiffon pie, although you would be hard put to find enough ripe fruits to give it a try; I only found enough unchewed fruit to fill a baseball cap. Everything in the woods, from bears to mice, eats paw paws. Paw paw seeds are the size of nickels, and as hard and brown as mahogany. They are designed to be gulped down with the sweet pulp and (ahem) deposited some distance away from the parent tree. Dan Janzen, an ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania writes that these fruits, along with those of persimmon, honey locust, and others, were originally dispersed by Ice Age megafauna such as mastodons and giant sloths (or as those in the business call them, BHMs - Big Hairy Mammals). If that is true, when you enjoy a ripe paw paw, fresh off the forest floor, you are fulfilling a role once played by extinct beasts. Just remember to swallow and do like the bears do.

Bluegills, Satellites, and Sneakers

Ask any angler what was their first catch and, nine times out of ten, the answer will be "bluegill". Bluegills are perfect pan fish. Small enough for a kid to handle, aggressive enough to bite on any bait, and abundant as anything that swims. They are also very scrappy at the other end of the line. There is a whole subculture of fly-fishers whose art is devoted to the deception of bluegills. The local sporting goods shop sells more artificial flies designed for bluegills than for trout. Trout in this area are fading aristocrats; the last local population of native brook trout vanished when the town of Reston was constructed and the last self-sustaining population of brown trout is in danger from a planned highway. Bluegills and their many cousins, however, proliferate in any body of water bigger than a a wading pool. I have netted bluegills from a golf course pond no bigger than an average suburban bathroom.



Bluegills are are related to the perches and are members of the family Centrarchidae, which includes large- and small-mouth bass. Centrarchids are an ancient North American speciality; found coast-to-coast and from Mexico to above the Arctic Circle. They have survived the dinosaurs and have been transplanted by humans to all parts of the globe. Bluegills (and their cousins the basses) are native to the Mississippi River drainage system and were brought to the Atlantic rivers in the late 19th century. Bass were taken to California in the water tenders of steam locomotives almost as soon as the Golden Spike was driven. Now that the Potomac has been cleaned up, thanks to gazillions of your tax dollars (thanks!)and the introduction of an aquatic weed that thrives in polluted water, it has become a major stop on the Pro Bass Fishing Tour. Yes, there are professional bass anglers. One of the cable channels carries pro-bassin' programs. I guess it's entertainment, but watching someone else fish is slightly more boring than watching paint dry.

Bluegills are colonial breeders, meaning all the bluegills in the pond will be nesting at the same time. From about late June until now, if you haunt ponds, lakes, slow moving creeks, and other assorted wetland areas, you will see what looks like a series of small bomb craters lining the banks in water about a foot or so deep and going out into deeper water. These are bluegill nests. Given the limited area for nesting, competition is fierce. Males stake out hexagonal territories, build a round depression in the bottom, and stand guard with all their breeding colors showing. A bluegill in breeding fettle is as pretty as any exotic fish from the rain forests that you may see in the local aquarium store. Males build and guard their nests fiercely; they will attack anything encroaching into their territory and a small lure trolled near the surface is sure to get a strike. Females flit from nest to nest, sizing up the males and deigning to lay a few eggs in whatever nest whose male strikes their fancy. One female can produce up to 50,000 eggs, but she will distribute them around several nests, mating with several males. A single nest can hold up to the same number of eggs produced by a single female, so the numbers even out. Eggs hatch in about a week, and the young spend their first year or so hiding in weeds or submerged brush. Two- and three-year olds begin breeding and five-year old bluegills are rare. Nests near the center of the colony are preferred and males compete for them, the bigger guys ousting the smaller ones. Nests on the edges are more heavily preyed upon by catfish and surprisingly, snails, which may account for up to half the egg losses. A closely related sunfish, the pumkinseed, is a solitary nester. Pumkinseeds feed on snails and may cruise around the bluegill colony hoping to pick up a quick snack.

It may seem that the big alpha males have all the advantages in colonial nesting, but they are not alone in the sweepstakes to get their genes out to the next generation. Aside from other alpha males constantly patrolling the colony, hoping to take over an established nest(any male you catch will be almost instantly replaced), two other male types; satellites and sneakers, also lurk the shallows. Satellites are males, but with female coloration and some their behaviors. When a couple begin to go into their breeding behavior, a satellite will come into the nest and join in, mimicking the female. This is the stuff of Penthouse Letters for the alpha male and he happily and blindly sets forth. When the real female releases her eggs and the alpha male begins to fertilize them, the satellite also releases a cloud of milt to mix in. Up to half the eggs in a nest may be fathered by satellites. Unless the sneakers get into the act as well. Sneakers are dwarf males, hanging around the edges of territories, looking inconspicuous, and staying out of trouble. At the right moment, a sneaker will dash in upon the happy couple, release his milt, and be gone before the alpha male realizes what's happening.

Bluegill population genetics are such that neither satellites nor sneakers will ever get too abundant; both populations are dependent, almost parasitic on a good number of territorial alpha males who stake out territories and defend the nests, eggs, and young. Even so, next time you take a kid fishing, don't forget to ask your catch "Who's your daddy?"

Happy Birthday, Carl Linnaeus, the Man Who Saved the Loch Ness Monster

This year (June actually) marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who invented the system of biological nomenclature. An excellent article by David Quammen on the man and his achievement (Quammen calls him the first "information architect") may be found in the June, 2007 National Geographic.

Without going into the detail so well described in the Geographic article, let me present, for your amusement, a couple of stories told me by a taxonomist and member of the Linnean Society.

It seems that Carl was either a) possessed of an extremely dry wit, or b) a cranky old fusspot. The Norway rat (actually from the steppes of central Asia) was named Rattus norvegicus by Linnaeus because, as a Swede, he despised Norwegians. He must really have had it in for Germans since the German cockroach (Blatella germanicus) is really from tropical west Africa.

Linnaeus named both the house mouse (Mus musculus) and the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus). Here we have one of the smallest of mammals and the largest creature who ever lived, both sharing a name. One wonders why...perhaps a joke? "Hey Sven, go get me a musculus"; leaving poor Sven to wonder if he needs a jar or a harpoon.

Linnaeus' legacy is the orderly system of naming living things (he tried it for minerals, but gave it up as way too complex). The foundation of the system is the genus and species. All living things must be named according to the rules set forth by the rules of nomenclature. Plants must be described in a scholarly journal in Latin, and a specimen, called the type specimen, must be deposited in an accredited institution. The type and associated description ultimately are what all members of that species are measured against when taxonomists try to determine what ever it is they may have in hand. The rules for animals are pretty much the same with the exceptions that the description need not be in Latin, and the type specimen may be a part or even a photograph of the animal. If you discover a new species, you get to name it. Linnaeus described and named us; Homo sapiens. Guess who he named as the type specimen? Himself. We are all held comparable to a middle-aged Swedish man. Go figure.

On to the Loch Ness Monster. In the 1970's, a plan was hatched to depth-charge Loch Ness in an effort to bring some closure (dead or alive) to the myth of the Loch Ness Monster. To thwart this, Sir Peter Scott (son of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, of Antarctic fame, and a founder of the World Wildlife Fund) and Robert Rimes co-published a paper in the journal Nature, describing the beast. They named it Nessiteras rhombopteryx (Greek for "the wonder of Ness with the diamond shaped fin"), "affinities uncertain". As a type specimen, the authors used a pair of blurry photos, purported to be of the Nessie, one showing what could be imagined as a squarish fin, the other just a blob. Under the rules of zoological nomenclature, the photos counted as a type specimen. Nessie was placed on the British list of endangered species and saved from a cruel fate. Some skeptics have noted Nessiteras rhombopteryx is an anagram for "Monster hoax by Sir Peter S." Robert Rines responded to these critics with his own anagram: "Yes, both pix are monsters, R."

Plan B

"If we had a Plan B, it would have been Plan A"
--Unforgettable line from an unremembered movie


A catbird has claimed the overgrown corner of the yard by the swing set. A Chinese wisteria has been climbing the framework for a couple of years now, despite my best efforts to tame it. It has attracted hangers on as well, including a blackberry. The bramble attracted the catbird who drives off any other birds remotely in the area. Blackberries are among the early- to mid-summer ripening fruits that drive the birds nuts. When I say "ripen", I mean turn red. Red blackberries are to this palate, slightly sour and insipid. It's only when they become that deep purple-black with the intoxicating fruity aroma that I get interested. I used to eat myself sick on them when I was a kid. Little did I know that I was just part of Plan B for the plant to scatter its seeds.

Red fruits are hugely attractive to birds. Hence, cherries, dogwood, magnolia, and holly berries. These trees produce large numbers all at once and the birds swarm to them. I have seen a cherry, red fruits glowing in the woods like Christmas ornaments, filled with orioles, grackles, robins, and who knows what, all gorging together. Dogwood, magnolia, and holly, their berries loaded with high-energy lipids, ripen just in time for the south-bound migrants and I have seen the trees in my front yard striped in only a few short hours by hordes of robins and cedar waxwings.

Blackberries go a slightly different path; only a few berries ripen each day, keeping the catbird coming back for more, ensuring a steady customer. The catbird inspects all parts of the vine, looking for the telltale red berries. Finding one, it gobbles it down and keeps looking for more. In places where blackberries are abundant, like in the woods where I grew up (along the creek by the old leaky buried sewage line...who knew?), birds just can't keep up with the sheer poundage of fruit. This is where Plan B comes in. If the red berries are not eaten, they just keep ripening until they drop off the vine or a mammal, a raccoon, deer, opossum, or ten-year old kid, happens by. Purple, loaded with sugar and smelling vaguely like strawberries, they are definitely a come-hither treat. Enough of the seeds pass through the gut without being chewed (or stuck between molars) to ensure deposition some ways off. Even if the berries drop off the vine, they are sought out by box turtles who have a surprisingly sweet tooth (actually, they have no teeth at all, but you get the picture).

If you can find a trove of blackberries that the birds couldn't keep up with, and the turtles haven't beaten you to, pick a pint or so to take home (what you eat on the spot doesn't count), crush lightly to get the juices going and serve over vanilla ice cream. Better yet, pick two pints and freeze one for later; Summer in January never tasted so good.

The Eternal Dance

Every member of a prey species can take it as given that they will never die of old age. Something faster, more clever, or just luckier will find them first. Every gazelle knows, deep down in its DNA, that it needs to outrun the fastest cheetah it encounters today, and every cheetah knows it needs to outrun the slowest gazelle. The slow genes are remorselessly weeded out of the population, resulting in ever faster animals - predator and prey drive each other's evolution. Case in point, the American pronghorn. This elegant creature can hit speeds of close to 70 miles per hour, a leftover trait from 15,000 years ago when the American cheetah stalked the Great Plains. The cheetah is extinct (probably due to the advent of humans crossing the land bridge from Asia), but the pronghorn's speed abides.

Prey species have a whole bag of tricks to keep from becoming dinner. Fish school, birds flock, mammals herd. The idea is that a predator needs to pick out one individual to concentrate on in order to maximize success. Most predators make a kill only about one in ten tries at best. So, if you are bunched up and moving at top speed, the predator you are trying to avoid will lose you in the crowd. At least that's the theory. But predators have tricks up their proverbial sleeves as well. School of fish crowding into a tight ball so any individual is lost? Attack the whole ball like swordfish and marlin do. Lash about in a crowd and you are certain to hit something which can be eaten at leisure. Humpback whales go one better; they swim below the packed school of fish, and blow a stream of bubbles while circling the base. This "bubble net" serves to pack the school even more densely and the whale comes up from below, mouth open, to engulf the whole shebang.

I was beach combing at Bethany last fall when I saw a flock of sanderlings swirling up in a tight spiral. At first, I thought it was smoke until my eyes made out the individual birds. Sanderlings are those tiny sandpipers everyone sees at the beach but no one really notices. One of several related species of small sandpipers, known to birders as "peeps", they run up and down the beach, always staying just out of the wash of the surf. Running like clockwork toys, they examine each new swatch of wet sand for any tiny mole crab or other crustacean exposed by the receding wave. In fall, they form small flocks, some of which stay along the mid Atlantic, others travel to points south. The flock I was watching spiraled even tighter when a peregrine falcon appeared from out of nowhere. The sanderlings had seen it and recognized it for what it was and were taking the only defense they knew -keep moving, keep shifting. They seemingly moved in precise unison. Ornithologists originally thought flocking birds were telepathic by the way they seem to move as a single unit. Researchers, using high speed movies, were able to notice how one bird begins the move with the nearest neighbors mirroring it. The movement ripples across the flock too fast for the unaided human eye to see.



A peregrine can outfly any bird in the sky, so fleeing was not an option. The peregrine dove through the spiral, splitting it in two. The two smaller flocks, still spiralling, separated and the falcon dove through the smaller of the two. The birds veered as one and kept the tight spiral. All but one - too old keep up, too young to recognize the signals,or just plain out of luck. One sanderling found itself alone. The Japanese have a saying: "the lone nail gets hammered down". The falcon knew this and now had a single individual on which to concentrate. While the rest of the flock, knowing they were safe, sped down the beach, the lone peep, in a final defensive maneuver, dropped like a rock onto the water. The peregrine hovered over the hapless sanderling floating on the surface, and with all the grace and precision of a dinner party guest picking up a canape, plucked the peep from the surface and quenched it in one great yellow talon. The falcon flew up-beach to pluck and devour its meal. The sanderlings settled back down on the beach to continue their clockwork minuet with the waves, searching for tidbits.



Everybody eats. Everybody dances.

Silent Sentinels

They march, in an irregularly spaced line, from Fenwick Island, to the entrance of Delaware Bay at Cape Henlopen, in the north. The casual tourist may be forgiven for mistaking them for lighthouses for they share the same tall windswept, somewhat foreboding isolation. Closer inspection, however, shows bricked-up doors and windows, ending in a steel-railed parapet 40 to 75 feet on the topmost deck. These are coastal watch towers, their usefulness almost 70 years past, and abandoned to the elements, with the occasional historical plaque to tell half-interested readers exactly what they are and why they are there.

By 1942, the Battle of the Atlantic was going badly for the Allies; German U-boats, operating seemingly at will off the East and Gulf coasts, sunk an ever higher toll of shipping each month. While U.S. shipyards were building replacement ships at an accelerated pace and would soon catch up with and surpass the losses, the toll extracted by the wolf packs was fearful and went largely unanswered. U-boats lay in wait off coastal and resort towns, torpedoing ships as they passed silhouetted by the city lights. Burning tankers drew curious crowds of boardwalk spectators in much the same way a traffic accident would at rush hour. Bodies of merchant seamen regularly washed ashore along the Eastern Seaboard.

Delaware's coastal defenses construction began in 1939 and lasted for three years. Fort Miles, built at Cape Henlopen, was essentially a land-locked battleship sporting two 16-inch guns (the same as carried on the USS Iowa), two 12-inch guns, and a battery of four 6-inchers. The 16-inch battery could fire one-ton projectiles nearly 25 miles. Fort Miles also controlled a minefield, which could be turned off electronically for ships to pass, and stretched the width of Delaware Bay. Thirteen towers; eleven in Delaware and two near Cape May, New Jersey, manned by troops from the US Army's 261 Coast Artillery Regiment, were the spotters for the formidable guns at Fort Miles. Equipped with radios, fire control radar units, and various optics including azimuth sighting range finders, the soldiers kept vigil over the approaches to Delaware Bay. Azimuth sighting range finders visually determine a target's position using the measure along the horizon of the angle between the object and a fixed reference point. Sightings from two towers were triangulated and sent to the the fort to position the guns. At least that was the theory; the guns were never fired at a target.

Tower 7, located in Henlopen State Park has been restored and is open to the public. If you don't have a head for heights, don't visit, even though the steel ladder was replaced by a steel circular stair.

The towers were built on creosoted pilings hammered into the sand and a concrete base was laid on top. The towers themselves were constructed from reinforced concrete, strengthened by wire mesh and steel rebar. The concrete was poured into a hollow 16-foot diameter form, with walls a foot thick, in a singe 24-hour pour. After the concrete cured for about a month, steel ladders and wooden decks were added, and the tower was open for business. Beach sand was used to cut costs and the towers had a life expectancy of 20 years or less.

The towers continue to keep vigil after nearly 70 years, weatherng nor'easter storms and hurricanes, their footings washed by high tides. Pigeons roost on the rusted steel railings and rise in clouds when the odd falcon passes in migration. Pink at dawn and sunset, the Delaware towers have become as much a part of the landscape as the beaches themselves over which they loom.

What Money Can't Buy (Almost)

"Only two things money can't buy;

True love and home-grown tomatoes"

- Old Song


Fresh tomato season has snuck up upon us. I'm not talking about those spheroids that are hard as baseballs, flavored weak as water, imported from foreign lands like California and Florida, and available year-round in the local Safeway; oh no, I'm talking the meaty, red as first-water rubies, off the vine delicacies I get at my local hardware store (light bulbs, chain saw oil,local vegetables). These are early-maturing varieties, trucked down from the Amish farmers in Hanover County, Pennsylvania, and taste like the essence of summer. Attack one armed with a salt shaker - the juices run down your chin and the flavor pops on your tongue.

Grocery store tomatoes are picked green for better shipping and turn red by the application of ethylene gas which breaks down the chlorophyll. Unfortunately, the gas does not affect insoluble calcium pectinate, which in real tomatoes, breaks down into soluble pectin, allowing that satisfying chomp.

We take our tomatoes seriously around here. A crab cake sandwich just doesn't taste right without a slice of ripe tomato. Better yet, make a crab salad and fill a hollowed out tomato. Add a crisp white wine and lunch does not get any better.

The great Earl Weaver, manager of the Baltimore Orioles back in their glory days at Memorial Stadium, had a tomato patch out near the bullpen and woe betide any grounds keepers who interfered with his crop. He is said to have handed out fresh tomatoes like game balls to his star players. I'm sure Cal Ripken must have become sick of them.

If you want to be really decadent, try sauteing an onion in good olive oil until it caramelizes; add a stick of pepperoni, sliced thin; and a good ripe diced tomato. Let it cook on high heat until the tomato just starts to break down and add a half cup of sour cream. Meanwhile, the prudent chef will have boiled a pound of rigatoni, taking care to remember that this particular pasta always takes longer than originally thought. Drain the pasta and pour into the pot of sauce. Toss to mix and eat. This is a very rich, old Venetian recipe my grandmother taught me (even thought she was a Triestina to the core). Enjoy.

Botanically speaking, tomatoes are true berries. The ancestral form, found in the Andean foothills are tiny and mostly eaten by birds which disperse their indigestible seeds. The seeds are indigestible to us as well and many a sewage treatment plant has tomato vines growing riot around the periphery.

Tomatoes were taken to Europe by the Spanish with the other spoils of the Aztec and Inca conquests: gold, jade, corn, and chilis. When they reached southern Europe, tomatoes were greeted as Mana from Heaven, and become an integral part of the cuisine. Thomas Jefferson brought tomatoes to North America after serving as Ambassador to France and travelling widely through Europe. He experimented with various cultivars and ate them regularly to the great alarm of his friends. At the time, tomatoes were called "love apples", grown as ornamental plants only, and were widely believed to be poisonous. This is only partly true; the leaves, vines, and raw green fruit contain alkaloids such as solanum, scopalamine, and various other nasty things which act as natural insecticides. Tomatoes are in the same botanical family, Solanacae, and related to peppers, potatoes, and tobacco; all of which produce various witches' brews of defensive chemicals.

Another Solanacae, Jimsonweed, contains a powerful hallucinogen, and was originally called Jamestown Weed after the first English settlement in Virginia. It seems several settlers during one of the regular food shortages tried eating this particular weed. They were out of it for several days and the practice soon caught on among their bored and hungry neighbors and had to be suppressed by the authorities. The settlers soon switched to growing and using tobacco, which, as we all know, is completely harmless. Interestingly, the tobacco they originally obtained from the Indians and grew as a cash crop is not the same one may find in the average pack of Luckies today. John Rolf, of Pocahontas fame, imported a different species for the plantations from Central America. The early form is still grown in parts of Europe where it is used for insecticides.

The tomatoes from the hardware store don't quite measure up to home-grown. I haven't planted any this year, but neighbors have. Tomatoes are prolific enough that I expect to see a bag or two left on the doorstep before long.

Graduations and Transitions

When we spaced our kids four years apart (only semi by design), it never occurred to Pat and me that, off in the distant mists of the future, there might be a problem with scheduling graduations. Ariel is a newly-minted graduate of Randolph Macon College, BA in English and minor in Women's Studies, and Alec has graduated from James Madison High School here in Vienna. He will be going to James Madison University in the fall.


By the luck of the draw, the graduation ceremonies were not on the same day, but Alec's prom fell on the evening of Ariel's graduation. This entailed his cadging a ride to Ashland from his cousins and hightailing it out of town as soon as the events were over. He needed to: pick up his suit from the cleaners, a task which had been put off for weeks; pick up flowers for Allison, his date; get something to eat; and show up at the appointed spot with his friends and their dates for the obligatory pre-prom photos by the parents. After which, they caravaned to Centerville, about 20 miles down the road to assemble at the limos for transport to the actual prom. All of this logistical block and tackle work would have presented little problem but for the fact that Ariel had been involved in a fender-bender the week earlier. Her car was still in the shop in Ashland. Since her car was hors-de-combat, I had to drive my truck down because all graduates had to be out of their dorms by 5 p.m. that day. We (Pat and I with my mom) drove down the night before to avoid I-95 Saturday gridlock and spent the night in a nearby hotel. Up early so Pat could take my truck to campus, picking up a bouquet of pink roses and daisies on the way, parking the truck at the body shop three blocks away. Ariel's dorm is on the main drag of campus and the street in front was closed for the graduation which was taking place next door on the fountain plaza "under the oaks", as we like to say here in the South. Everything went off without a hitch; Alec showed up on time to process with his sister for the robing (he put the stole over her shoulders). The obligatory speeches were delivered, and the soon to be alumni (we already received fund raiser mail) marched across the stage ("don't trip, don't trip") and picked up their sheepskins.


Luncheon under tents and a veritable orgy of picture taking followed. Hugs, high fives, tears and promises to keep in touch were the order of the afternoon. Except for me...I trudged to get the truck and negotiated with a campus police officer to thread the barricade and park in front of the dorm. Ariel and her roommate had made a rudimentary attempt at packing up their stuff and a couple of hours and discoveries of long-lost objects ("I thought I lost that last March"), vehicles were loaded and the trek back up I-95 resumed.


We met at home, dropped off the truck and sped off to the pre-prom photo op. We got there with minutes to spare, and, along with the other parents, shot endless pix of very grown-up looking young ladies and gentlemen. We didn't see Alec until the next morning when his answers to any and all prom-related questions consisted of monosyllabic grunts. I take it he had a good time. One final piece of shrapnel for this temporal hand-grenade was everyone had to be at church that morning for a "recognition of the graduates". I'm sure everybody recognized Ariel and Alec, even though they were half asleep and moving like zombies.


This past Wednesday, high school graduation took place. Ariel drove to get grandma, growing increasingly panicky in the afternoon beltway gridlock, with two hours head start, they just made it back to grab a bite and then off to the biggest high school in Fairfax County for the ceremony. Skies glowering, we followed the herd into the parking lot and as the rain began to pelt down, jumped the curb and parked on the median strip. Into the cavernous field house and up into a set of very shaky bleachers to watch the ceremonies.



I guess all graduations are at heart about the same. Substitute the names of the schools, the speakers, and the students and you pretty much have a repeat of the last one. Except this is your kid who stayed up nights writing term papers on the influence of Shakespeare on Saul Bellow or sweating through calculus homework or any of a dozen traumatic events which now seem kind of trivial. Milestone achieved, diploma in hand, future by the throat, world their oyster, here they come, ready or not.



It seems like just a couple of weeks ago Pat and I were discussing daycare.

Rock Creek BioBlitz, 2007

"3..2..1..Go!" Boyd Matthessen, the ruggedly handsome host of National Geographic Explorer TV counting down the final seconds to the beginning of the Rock Creek Park BioBlitz. The BioBlitz was to be a 24-hour, noon to noon, snapshot of all the living things within the park, the nation's oldest urban national park. Established the same year as Yosemite, Rock Creek Park is in the heart of Washington, D.C. Teddy Roosevelt rode horseback on the trails and swam bareback in the creek. Generations of naturalists and biologists have studied it. This time, 200 or so assorted scientists, naturalists, and hangers-on would fan out over the core area in a combination invasion and scavenger hunt find out just what lives here. A crew from the University of Central Missouri was roping into the tree canopy, 150 feet up, to look for assorted arboreal algae, fungi, and slime molds. Another crew from the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation was sampling the soil for bacteria. Yet another crew was collecting and cataloging Tardigrades (commonly known as water bears); minuscule worm-like critters, that live in the water film surrounding sand grains in damp beaches. Micheal Fay, a National Geographic Explorer in Residence who walked the Mega-Transect across the African rain forest a couple of years ago, was making a mini-transect through the park. The rest of us arranged ourselves somewhere in between big and small, great and not so great, to pillage and plunder whatever we could. Everyone who signed up received an official packet of a water proof notebook and pen to record our findings, a water bottle, and official BioBlitz bandanna. Most people folded the bandannas over their heads, buccaneer style, giving the data teams a certain piratical raffish look that only true nerds can pull off.


Teams worked in 4-hour shifts to gather data and collate it, then the volunteers had the opportunity to move on to something else. My first team was freshwater fishes, lead by several stalwart fellows from the District of Colombia Department of Fish and Wildlife. They were loaded for bear in a piscatorial sense, packing an electroshocker and several dip nets. We drove to the dam just below Pierce Mill, an 18th century historical grist mill and went to work. Within five minutes, the first electro-stunned specimens began to be brought back for identification, recording and measuring. Large mouth bass; check. Small mouth bass; check. Yellow bullhead catfish; check. Green sunfish; check. All in all, the team picked up 20 species. Not a bad haul, considering we were too late for most of the anadromous fish - those species that migrate up from salt or brackish water to spawn in freshwater streams. Rock Creek receives American shad, stripped bass (rockfish), two different species of river herrings, and sea lampreys. (A newly opened fish ladder around the dam allows fish to travel more than 20 miles farther upstream.) We did, however, get one each of yellow and white perch which was surprising since these are among the early upstream migrants; maybe they were just hanging around waiting for us. A crayfish and one well and truly ticked-off snapping turtle were logged for other teams.



On to bugs; there were several teams assigned to insects and their ilk. You could choose ants, aquatic insects, caterpillars, and/or general stuff. The general stuff team was led by Gary Hevel, a Smithsonian entomologist who did a 4-year survey of the insects in his Silver Spring, Maryland backyard. He collected nearly 4,000 species - and is still identifying them. We swept a meadow using butterfly nets, in the accepted dotty entomologist fashion, coming up with huge numbers of plant bugs and a few others, all duly counted and cataloged. I hope someone remembered to run up to the Zoo (technically part of Rock Creek Park) and pry up the manhole cover on an old well to find and count Hay's Blind Spring Scud; a species of freshwater shrimp and the only endangered species endemic to the District.

The owl people and bat people (teams, not tribes from Survivor), picked up screech and barred owls, and eastern pipestrel and little brown bats in the course of the night... which I spent home in bed, to arrive next morning in time for the last birder shift before closing. Sixty-odd species in 4 hours work, not a bad morning. red-eyed and Philadelphia vireos, bay-breasted warblers, wood, grey-cheeked, and Swainson's thrushes and scarlet tanagers were among the highlights.

The goal for the 24-hours was 1,000 species. At the end, teams had identified 660 of everything, with the tree climbers, tardigrades, and micro-organisms teams still working. When they have finished counting the "little things that make the world turn", the thousand species goal will have been left far behind.

Cutty Sark

Last weekend, the extreme clipper ship Cutty Sark burned to the waterline in its display drydock in Greenwich, England. The fire destroyed or damaged two of the three decks of vessel, including original hull timbers that were live trees at the time of the battle Agincourt in 1415. The ship was undergoing extensive renovation, the first since the 1950's, and most of the decking, masts, and other parts were in storage away from the flames. Still, the damage is considerable. The Cutty Sark is the last of her kind, the last clipper ship, the last dinosaur.

In the later half of the 19th Century, American and British shipyards turned out clippers by the score. They traced their lineage to the Anne McKim of Baltimore, one of the earlier "Baltimore Clippers". Based on the lines of Chesapeake Bay craft, these clippers were sharp-lined with minimal drag, low to the water and carried astounding amounts of canvas. The name refers to their ability to "clip the speed from the last inch of wind". These ships were built for speed to carry expensive, perishable cargoes. Early Baltimore Clippers were used as opium runners and slave ships, as well as serving as privateers in the War of 1812; they were usually fast enough to get out of trouble quicker than they got into it.

The Cutty Sark was built as a tea clipper in 1869, sailing from Shanghai and Foo Chow, China to London, around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Atlantic. She was built in a Scottish yard, and named, as were so many Scottish built British clippers, for a Robert Burns poem, in this case, Tam O'Shanter. Her name refers to the short shift or slip worn by a young beguiling witch who tried to get the innocent Tam in her clutches, damning him for eternity. The ship flew a real cutty sark from the top of her main mast for her entire career.

Tea clippers were the true thoroughbreds of the sea, making the 15,000 mile China to London run in 100 days or less. When the clippers ruled the tea trade, there were men yet living who remembered taking over a year to make the same voyage. Tea clippers were the acme of 5,000 years of sailing evolution and were the most complex machines of their day, the 19th Century's equivalent of the Space Shuttle. Cutty Sark's great rival was the extreme clipper ship Thermopylae, built in 1868 in Aberdeen. In 1872, the two ships left Shanghai on the same tide and never lost sight of each other until the Cutty Sark lost her rudder in a storm in the Sunda Straits off Indonesia. Despite having to ship a jury-built rudder (twice), the Cutty Sark raised London only 7 days after the Thermopylae; it was the last time she would lose.

In 1866, three years before the Cutty Sark was built, the greatest of the clipper ship tea races took place. Sixteen clippers left Foo Chow for London. The Ariel and Taeping sailed on the same tide and ran 15,000 miles, neck and neck, to the London docks. The trip took 99 days and 20 minutes for the Ariel, and another 20 minutes for the Taeping. A third ship, the Serica, docked in London within the hour on the same tide and a fourth, the Fiery Cross docked the next day. The captains and crews of the Ariel and Taeping split the prize bonus for the first tea to reach the docks, and a legendary rivalry was born. Taeping won the next year, and in 1868, the Ariel was first by an hour. The Taeping was wrecked in the South China Sea in 1871, and the Ariel went missing a year later. Tea clippers were built for maybe 30 years in service; most lasted for far shorter times. Built to tread the fine line between speed and disaster, many simply vanished at sea.

The Suez Canal opened in 1868 and soon put the tea clippers out of business. Steam ships could carry much larger cargoes, the canal cut the distance by over a third, and the square riggers were effectively barred from the canal since they had to follow the trade winds and the yearly monsoon around Africa. Many clippers were rerigged to reduce sail area and thereby cut the large crew size required to maintain the huge spreads of canvas. They began lives as general cargo tramps, sailing from port to port with no fixed schedules, and picking up such cargoes as were available for delivery to the next port and next cargo.

The Cutty Sark was a relative slow-poke compared to the earlier greyhounds, but found her glory on the Melbourne to London run for the Australian wool trade. The Australian wool trade, with its bounty for the first spring wool to reach the London docks and the English textile mills, was the last gasp for the remaining clippers. Cutty Sark became the undisputed champion of the run, making the passage across the Pacific, around Cape Horn, and up the Atlantic in 73 days in 1885, beating the Thermopylae by a full week. She ruled the run for the next 10 years and became known as the "go to" ship for late cargoes. In 1889, in a feat unheard of, she overhauled and passed a steamship moving at 17 knots.

Cutty Sark was sold out of service, rerigged as a bark to reduce the size of the crew needed to operate and maintain her, and was later bought and restored to her former glory by a wealthy Scottish industrialist to become a museum ship. Her legendary rival Thermopylae suffered a crueler fate: sold to the Portuguese government, she served as a cadet training ship for many years and was sunk for naval target practice in 1907.

Walking in the Ocean(s)

When I was a kid on the Piedmont in Montgomery County, Maryland, I was crazy for dinosaurs. I got hooked (like most kids) around third grade, and by fifth grade had read the books by Roy Chapmann Andrews, a paleontologist from the American Museum who roamed the Gobi looking for fossils in the 1930's. Andrews was a larger than life character. He fought off bandits, nearly died of thirst, and discovered the first dinosaur eggs. Steven Spielberg read the same books and morphed Roy into Indiana Jones. I must have turned over every rock within a five-mile radius of my house, always with the same result -nothing. They were just rocks. As luck and GI-Bill housing economics would have it, all the rocks I picked up were wrong for at least two reasons: they were almost all metamorphic, and they were all too old.

Turns out, I was too far north by a county; some of the first dinosaur fossils in North America were found on the Coastal Plain in Prince Georges County and they are still being dug out of the clay there.

It wasn't until I took a geology course, complete with field trips, in the Master Naturalist program sponsored by the Northern Virginia Audubon Society, (insert shameless plug here: http://www.asnv.org/) that I began to get a clue about what had happened here on the Piedmont. The field trips were great; I got to travel to strange and different worlds. The worlds in question is the one we are sitting on; geology is the science of the way-back machine. I learned that the mid-Atlantic, especially Northern Virginia, has some of most complex geology on the planet, with titanic continental collisions, volcanos spewing lava a thousand feet thick, and general mayhem going back nearly a billion years.

If you plan it right, you can walk on the floor of two oceans (two and a half if you make the drive to the beach). The rocks at Great Falls on the Potomac are old ocean floor. Over 500 million years ago the African Continent pushed up against the North American Continent in a slow motion collision. This closed the Iapetus Ocean (one of the Titans, Iapetus was the father of Atlantis). The ocean floor that was between them had no place to go but up and folded into tall mountain peaks. Asia and India are doing the bump right now and the Himalayas grow microscopically taller day by day. Climbers bring back fossil snails and clams as souvenirs from Everest and K-2. The mountains that formed when Africa slammed into North America (one would need the time scale of the gods to really see the crunch) were as high or higher than the Himalayas. Time passed. The mountains wore down bit by bit, grain by grain, until now just the roots are left. The oceanic crust at the heart of the mountain range transformed into the metamorphic rocks that are now found throughout the Potomac Gorge. The original muds and silts of ocean floor were changed by enormous pressure and heat into mica schists and related rocks. Here and there, gnarly crystalline chunks stand out in relief, harder than the rock surrounding them and more resistant to wear.

Jump in your time machine, or trusty Toyota extended cab pickup, and fast forward about 400 million years to the Triassic, or drive upstream about 15 miles to Seneca, Maryland and Riley's Lock on the C&O Canal. Walk upstream from the parking lot, cross the partially rebuilt aqueduct holding the canal bed, and come to a wide place on the water. The rocks here are all red sandstone. The wide place was used as a turning basin for canal barges back when the C&O was a going concern. It was also a dock and loading point for the quarries. Walk back in the woods and you can find the remnants of the quarries and the ruins of the buildings that housed the giant saws used to cut the sandstone into building blocks. The Smithsonian Castle is made from red Seneca sandstone, as is the interior of Washington Monument. You are standing in the Culpepper Basin; a dip in the Earth's surface formed when Africa and North America ended their embrace and cracked back apart. As they broke, the widening rift filled and became the Atlantic Ocean. Africa and North America are still pulling apart at about the same rate as your fingernails grow. The Culpepper Basin is one of several basins formed as subordinate cracks to the Atlantic. Over time, streams deposited sand in the crack, filling it up. The brownstones of New York are made of the same rock from a different but related basin. You can carefully ease back a layer of stone from a boulder in the quarry, and looking at the fresh surface at an oblique angle, you can see ripples made when the stone was still sand and water flowed over it. You can find the tracks of early dinosaurs in some basins. The best I have done so far is find fossil tides.

Legal Migrants

Spring migration is finally in full swing. The forest canopy is greening up and the insects are hatching just in time for the migrants moving through. Our birds fall into three (very) general groups: the skeleton crew that is here all year long like cardinals, chickadees, and the like; the species that everyone thinks migrates but just shift their range up and down the continent, like robins; and the real deal, what ecologists call "neotropical migrants" like most of the warblers, tanagers, and orioles. These birds are really Central and South American; they just come up here when the sunlight goes over twelve hours per day. To them, it's an endless summer here, full of tasty bugs with lots of time to pursue them.

That explains the why. The how is pretty much anybody's guess. These are not big birds like Canada geese or whooping cranes who learn migration from their elders. Warblers are birds that can fit in a film canister. They fly thousands of miles, mostly at night (days are for feeding and resting), without maps, GPS, or asking for directions. There is good evidence that at least some species have a sky chart imprinted in their brains; others probably use the Earth's magnetic fields; most probably use a combination of both. Most of them come back to the same patch of forest or tundra where they were hatched.

Some nest here, others, like solitary sandpipers, are just passing through on their trip from Argentina and Uruguay to the Boreal forest or tiaga which encircles the globe at the higher latitudes.


Neotropical migrants are borrowed birds; escaping their tropical habitats which are jam-packed with other species in order to get some elbow room to produce young up here. Most of them look like they belong in the rain forest; indigo buntings are flying chunks of sky that put bluebirds to shame.

Prothonotary warblers, up from the Yucatan and northern South America nest in this area. They are one of the few warbler species that nest in cavities, usually in swamps. The chicks can swim. This bird gets its name from the color of the vestments of the Vatican College of Prothonotaries, part of the Curia. I have always thought it one of the more poetic common names for any animal. Sure beats the hell out of yellow-rumped warbler (known to birders as "butter butts").

Spring is in full cry. Our (really their) migrants are coming up, already here and moving on, or already here and nesting. The blue-gray gnatcatcher (another cool name; workman-like but falling trippingly off the tongue) from the Caribbean and Central America is already brooding eggs. I found this pair, the hen on the nest, and the male feeding her tent caterpillars. The nest is made from lichens and caterpillar silk; the silk gives it flexibility, allowing for expansion as the chicks grow.

The chicks will be up and out of the nest by mid-June, just in time for mom and dad to start a second brood. No empty nesters for this species - just crank 'em out and kick 'em out. Don't worry about tuition either.

Pucker Up

One of the few pleasures from having kids who are smarter than you is the ability to pull their chains; rattle their bars; and just plain out-and-out lie. Ariel has a catch-all term for when I do this: she calls it "White Chocolate". This stems from years ago when I tried to explain about white chocolate (white chocolate contains the chocolate butter but not the cocoa). Turns out I was right, but whenever she gets skeptical about something of dubious veracity, she retorts: "White Chocolate".



She played the "White Chocolate" gambit last Sunday when the family journeyed to the University of Virgina at Charlottesville to attend a dance recital. Alec's girl friend, Allison, is a member of the college dance troupe and gave us tickets. We got there in plenty of time, had a late and leisurely lunch at one of the cafes on "the Corner", and Ariel and I roamed the campus to look at Mr. Jefferson's buildings. We passed the Rotunda, walked down the colonnade where the fourth-years (never call them seniors) live, and saw the serpentine wall. Along the way, we passed a young man whistling a tune. Ariel remarked "I hate whistling", to which I replied that the reason she disliked whistling was that she was completely inept at it. I also added that the UVa music department was one of the few schools in the country who offered a major in whistling. Don't you know that, in addition to his many talents and interests as a child of the Enlightenment, that Thomas Jefferson was a concert whistler as well as violinist and in great demand as a performer? "No way" replied my daughter, "White Chocolate". We carried on thus until we came across Alec and Pat on benches in a leafy alcove, presided over by a statue of Mr. Jefferson himself. Alec chimed in that, in addition to writing several pieces for the glass harmonica (an instrument long since out of fashion), Mozart himself composed four concertos for whistlers. Ariel was somewhat nonplussed at that; either it was true, or Alec was riffing on the original bald-faced lie that Dad had started. I think my downfall was in pointing out that, if you examined the Jefferson statue closely, you could see his lips were pursed. They aren't. Had her going for a bit, though.

The recital, by the way, was delightful.

In Praise of Vultures

I was helping a friend move an old cast iron claw-footed bathtub/koi pond to his house in southern Maryland. We slid the monster out of the bed of my truck and manhandled it to a prominent spot in the front yard. As we rested from our labors, I heard a deep flapping sound overhead, very much like the rotor noise of a very slow helicopter. A black vulture labored overhead to come to a precarious stop in a leafless walnut tree. "Oh, him", said my friend, "they always come to the birdbath for a drink." I get chickadees and sparrows at my birdbath; he gets vultures...cool. This one, judging from its grey legs and bald black head was a (wait for it) black vulture as opposed to the more common red-headed turkey vulture. Either way, they are both amazing animals.




Vultures are very low energy animals. In the mornings they can be seen with their backs to the sun, wings spread, absorbing solar radiation to heat them up. When they fly, they rarely flap, preferring to glide from updraft to updraft. Sailplane pilots call it "riding the thermals" and often look for vultures to share an updraft of air. This is a risky business; if the updraft runs out, the vulture can and will flap. Sailplanes can't.


Black vultures are among the very few animals which mate for life and are, as far as we know, completely monogamous. I guess when you are a vulture, a little something on the side is pretty much out of the question anyway. Black vultures are a bit smaller than turkey vultures and can be told at distance by their white wing patches and the flat cast of their wings while soaring. Turkey vultures ("TVs") to the initiated, hold their wings in a shallow V. Both species constantly trim and adjust wings and long primary flight feathers to catch every morsel of breeze.


Both species have bald, featherless heads, the better to feed on yucky carcasses without fouling their feathers. Black vultures have the curious habit of defecating on their legs. This keeps them cool and serves as a barrier to any parasites that might be still around the dearly departed lunch. Both black and TVs nest in hollow logs on the forest floor and raise two or three young a year. Stories of vultures carrying off small children and pets don't hold water since their claws are too weak to hold much more than a pound or two. Vultures do, however, possess a potent defence; they projectile vomit. A friend who had it happen to her said she would have rather been clawed or bitten; duh...a half pint of semi-digested rotten meat would be enough to put any predator off thoughts of making a meal of a vulture...forever.


Turkey vultures have the most percentage of their brains devoted to smell of any known animal. T. rex comes a distant second. They are exquisitely sensitive to the odor of mercaptans, a common component of rotting meat, and the same odor the gas company adds to odorless natural gas. The human nose can detect mercaptans in vanishingly small amounts but vultures have us beat all hollow. Gas company trouble-shooters look for vultures circling above underground gas mains to find leaks. Black vultures are not quite as adept in the olfactory department as are TVs. They ride the updrafts and keep their cousins in sight. When the TVs drop down to a carcass, the more aggressive black vultures will drive them away and claim the food for themselves.


Until recently it was thought that New World vultures, including condors, were related to birds of prey as are Old World vultures. DNA testing has shown that our vultures are more closely related to storks than to hawks. Seems a tad poetic; one stork brings you in to the world, another may see you out.

Lightning in a Bottle

A petite lady, Jeanette Miller laughs as tells the story in the soft accents of rural Virginia. "We had a couple of young men here last month, Chuck gave them the tour and at the end, they told me they were ATF agents, showed me badges, and wanted to know if we had a license for the still. I said 'Sure, it's framed on the wall over your heads. They looked a little embarrassed, thanked me for my time and left." What the agents, presumably rookies put up to the "inspection" as a prank by their seniors, were touring was the Belmont Farm Distillery in Culpepper (http://www.virginiamoonshine.com/). You'd think the website, television programs on the History and National Geographic channels, and the all "Cultural Attraction" signs along U.S. Route. 29 might have tipped them off that there was nothing underhanded going on, but hey, your tax dollars at work.

Chuck and Jeanette Miller run the smallest whiskey distillery in the United States. Using a copper pot still, (Jaeger and Franzmann Coppersmiths, Yonkers, New York, serial number 3), they make Virginia Lightning corn whiskey, aged all of 30 days, clear as rainwater and 100 proof. They also make sippin' whiskey, Copper Fox, which is seasoned with charred white oak and apple wood chips in big cheesecloth bags, then aged the traditional way in white oak barrels.

Corn whiskey goes back to the roots of the Republic. One of George Washington's first tests as Commander in Chief was putting down the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Farmers had traditionally turned their cash crop of corn into whiskey, making it easier to transport than the bulky grain itself and bringing a better price to boot. They also did not want to pay Federal taxes on what they saw as just another farm commodity. Fielding an army the size of his Continental forces of the Revolution, Washington marched into western Pennsylvania, arresting a score of people, two of which were sentenced to be executed; Washington pardoned both. Skip forward a few dozen decades to the 1950's and 60's when good ole boys drove the stuff from the stills to distribution centers in high-powered Fords and Chevys. NASCAR was born when they realized that they could make more money driving around a flat oval track instead of along twisting back roads at night, one eye in the rearview mirror, and a flammable, potentially explosive cargo in the trunk. Some of the early legends of stock car racing including Buddy Baker and Lee (father of Richard) Petty got their starts runnin' moon.

Chuck's tour lasts all of 15 minutes. His entire operation is housed in a converted barn. Chuck learned his craft from his grandfather, who learned it from his father. Back then, this stuff was genuine moonshine and as illegal as heroin. You walk into the distillery through the gift shop (yet another clue the ATF gentlemen missed) and enter into an alchemist's den of shadows, heady brewery scents, and thumping machinery. "I need to change a bearing on the brewer but I can't while it's fermenting." says Chuck. Past the pot still itself, past vats and cylinders,glowing at the top like a live volcanoes, past the vintage mini-bottling plant, held together with bungee cords and to the 5-step water purifier.

Chuck explains: "The water has lots of limestone in it. That's great for brewing and for distilling, but I double-distill my whiskey to 150 proof, so I need to dilute down to 100 proof for sale. Limestone water makes it cloudy so I need to add purified water. It's all about the product." The product comes in lethal looking pints and fifths and tastes like pure history. Just make sure you're sitting down when you have some.