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.