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.