Wetlands and Witch-hazel

I had occasion to explore a wet meadow this morning and took some images while I was walking around with water nearly flooding into my L.L. Beans. I liked the misty background that I got in this image; it was cloudy, but it wasn't foggy.

A different perspective: here's the wet meadow from the hillside above.

On the hillside, witch-hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) was blooming. (Don't you just love to say that generic name?) Witch-hazel is the last woody plant to bloom each year. Can you believe that this shrub is fairly closely related to sweetgum trees (Liquidambar styraciflua)? They're in the same family. There's a bright red sweetgum in the background of the image above.

A close-up of the witch-hazel flowers. I wonder if the flowering time has anything to do with the plant's common name?

Quarry Woods

Reclaimed hard rock quarry

Yesterday, taking advantage of a glorious October afternoon, I inspected an old hard rock quarry in my neighborhood that had been filled with clean fill. The four-acre site will be donated to a local land trust to be incorporated into the 33-acre preserved forest that surrounds the quarry. The site's owner did a good job of refilling, recontouring, and reclaiming the quarry, but the fill was seeded with a non-native grass mixture to stabilize the soil. Stabilizing the soil is a good idea (especailly considering how much rain we've had lately), but it makes for poor wildlife habitat. Eventually, the land trust will reforest the site.

The land trust already has a nice one-mile trail that leads through the 33-acre woodland above the quarry.
The trail leads to a large patch of Southern arrow-wood (Viburnum dentatum). This probably should be the most common shrub in the woodlands, but it's also a favorite of the large white-tailed deer herd, so it's among the first plants to disappear from the understory and be replaced by spicebush (Lindera benzoin), which the deer don't find particularly palatable. This patch of arrow-wood was growing near the edge of the quarry, so perhaps it escaped because it was relatively inaccessible.

This was the dramatic evening sky at sundown last night.

Motion without Passion: BodyVox

Sure enough , it poured--I'm talking deluged--last Saturday night. I predicted in my last post that rain forecast for the weekend would bring down the leaves right at the peak of their color. Well, I was wrong about bringing down the leaves (at least not all of them; there's still a lot of attractive foliage on the trees), but it sure as hell rained on Saturday evening, just as we were headed to see a performance by the Portland, Oregon-based BodyVox contemporary dance company. By the time we arrived at the theater, the torrent had slackened to moderate wind-driven showers, but en route we had to ford innumerable raging creeks and pond-sized puddles in the roadways where the storm drains couldn't handle the volume of water--and all for a fairly mediocre evening of dance. Perhaps, given the weather, it was fitting that BodyVox was performing its extended work called "Water Bodies." Each dance comprising the work ostensibly had a water-related theme, though the connection was tenuous in some of the compositions.

The compositions were, without exception, clever. Many were accompanied by video projected on a screen behind the dancers. A few pieces were exclusively video footage of dances performed in a swimming pool.

Unfortunately, the performers seemed to be going through the motions mechanically rather than dancing; there was no joy--or, if the dancers were enjoying the movement, they certainly didn't communicate it very effectively to the audience. It's not that the dancers were wooden or unskilled; it was more that the choreography was at fault. Furthermore, the music was an irritant; it was too loud (don't I sound like an old guy?), cacophonous, and uninspired. It seems to me that when I first started attending contemporary dance performances, the music often was minimalist dissonant bangs and shrieks, but more recently choreographers have chosen more appealing music. BodyVox is trapped back in the Dark Ages of dissonance. In fact, one of the pieces I enjoyed the most related to doomed couples dancing on the deck of the Titanic; it was set to Jean Sibelius's Valse Triste.

Probably the best piece of the evening was performed by one of the co-artistic directors and founders, Jamey Hampton. A bathtub rolled onto stage, and Hampton (who had been hidden inside the tub) stood up in the tub. A soundtrack began that sounded like dripping water, and the dripping came faster and faster. Gradually, the dripping morphed into dance music and Hampton boogie-oogie-oogied in the tub. It was great fun, very creative, and he had some wonderful dance moves.

The overall performance lasted less than two hours. I commented to my wife that the evening was short (compared to that offered by some other damce companies). Her response? "Thank goodness." I agreed.

Daniel Kirk, sexiest of the BodyVox performers

October Sunset and Little Bluestem

A walk at dusk in my natural area produced some interesting sunset images. I especially liked the texture of the clouds.

Just a few minutes more and a few hundred feet further along the trail produced this image. Between the colors and the shapes of the clouds, they're almost menacing.

Also along the trail I came across a stand of native little bluestem grass (Schizachyrium scoparium). Though the stems have a bluish-gray tinge during the growing season (hence the name), in the fall and winter they turn a glorious russet color that's particularly impressive when the grass grows in broad swaths.

We're in for more wet weather this weekend--especially tonight into Saturday night. Yuck--another potentially beautiful autumn weekend ruined by rain. It'll probably knock the leaves off the trees just as the colors are reaching their peak.

More Canoeing Pix (for Ray)

By (Ray's) special request, here's another post full of pictures of my October 10, 2009, canoe/kayak marsh restoration field trip on Delaware's Christina River.

About two-thirds of the way through the trip, we pulled-up under a highway overpass to get out of our watercraft and climb up to road level to get a view out over the restored marshes. Here, we've made our beachhead.

Prior to canoeing into one of the restored marshes, our guide explained the restoration process.

Paddling into one of the restored marshes.

Native Wild-rice (Zizania aquatica), a sure sign of successful restoration in the marsh.

Near the end of our excursion, the trees lining the river were weighted down with noisy passerines. Most were Brown-headed Cowbirds, with some European Starlings and Common Grackles mixed in.

Yours truly, in the bow of the canoe.

A Foretaste of Winter

Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis), a "snow bird"

The Mid-Atlantic suffered through two Nor'easters this last weekend, starting on Thursday, October 15 and ending yesterday afternoon (Sunday, October 18). (For those who don't live along the Atlantic Coast, a Nor'easter is a storm that travels northward from the Carolinas up to New England. The winds circulate counterclockwise around the low pressure center that's hugging the coast [hence, nor'east winds], usually accompanied by rain [or snow] and flooding tides.) These storms made it unseasonably cold (mid-40s vs. typical mid-60s), damp and miserable. Bone-chilling weather.

On Friday evening, during a lull in the storm, I went to the compost pile to dump some of my kitchen waste. En route, I thought that I heard a White-throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis) singing, but it only came once and I wasn't positive. Then, on Saturday morning, I threw millet under my bird feeder and attracted two Dark-eyed Juncos (Junco hyemalis)--sure harbingers of winter. I thought that the sparrows and the juncos were early, but maybe not. The juncos were not to be seen Sunday or this morning, so perhaps they were the avant garde, and had moved further south.

Here's an image of a beautiful old red oak (Quercus rubra) stump quickly disappearing but playing host to lots of great fungi in the process. Earlier in the year, it sported slime mold colonies.

Bright Star

Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion (The Piano), is the story of Romantic poet John Keats and his lover and muse, Fanny Braune. It's gotten great reviews, so we went to see it on a rainy, cold Saturday afternoon.

The film is a little too long and a little too slow, but its major fault lies in the premise: penniless Keats meets barely comfortable Braune, and, despite the fact that he cannot provide for her financially, they fall in love and she becomes his muse, inspiring his poetry. All well and good, but the film tells the audience that this is happening but doesn't show it. Keats is an accomplished writer before he meets Braune, and he's still a writer (but no more financially successful) after he falls in love with Braune, but Campion never successfully demonstrates the power of Fanny's ability to act as Keat's muse.

Fanny has a younger brother and sister who appear frequently throughout the film, but who, between them, probably have six lines. It's a little weird to have these characters hanging around but not speaking.

Of course, the film is beautifully photographed and a delight to watch, and there's a wonderful and affecting scene in adjoining bedrooms depicting the incredible longing that the two characters share for one another. But in the end, the film really wasn't very engaging.