WAMU: Metro Connection

District's 'Bird Man' Documents City's Winged Creatures

WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:40:00 -0400

Every morning, Wallace Kornack leaves his Georgetown home just after dawn, and drives north into Rock Creek Park. Ever since he retired from his job as a nuclear engineer, he's taken his passion for science in a new direction. Up.

Kornack is, in the words of his friend Bill Butler, "the most hard-core birder in Washington, D.C." He has been in the park nearly every day, rain or shine, for the past 13 years. Other birders come out frequently, but no one as much as Kornack; he's the unofficial president of D.C.'s birding scene.

"The thing about birding, is you have to have exceedingly great patience," Kornack says, "It's going to be quiet for quite a long while. It's not very stimulating, but it's what we do."

Kornack walks around, saying hello to everyone and making sure he has his or her names. He keeps a list every morning of which birds were seen, and who saw them. "I appreciate a good birder, I want to know who they are, and I'll write their names down. They know me, I know them."

There's no published meeting time for the group; it grows mainly through word of mouth. During the week, there are just a handful of birders, but on the weekends — especially during the spring and fall — there can be as many as 50 people.

Many of those people come to look for a fairly small and vocal perching bird known as warbler. The warblers are making their way up from Mexico and heading toward Canada. They're here for just three or four weeks.

In the distance, Kornack spots Matthew Sileo, a 30-year-old University of Maryland graduate student. Kornack pulls out his pen to add Matthew's sightings to his list. "Two black throated greens... one yellow warbler... 10 yellow rumps... 3 red eyed Verios."

Kornack adds these to his list, which, as soon as he gets home, he types up and sends to an online database called e-bird. It's run by Cornell University, and because birders use it all over the world to look at migration patterns, Kornack's pretty careful about which observations make the cut.

"Depends on the credibility of the birder, and most of the people here are very experienced birders," he says.

After two hours of birding, the group is now leaning against a fence, chatting and pointing their binoculars up into the trees for any final identification. Today was not a big day, Kornack says, but still there are dozens of birds on the list.

"There are disappointing days, but there are very exciting times, too. That's what brings you out every time... the unexpected appearing before your eyes."

[Music: "Bird Man Blues" by Bobby Gordon from Bobby Gordon Plays Joe Marsala / "Come Fly With Me" by Stephen Kummer from Jazz For the Road]

Why Is D.C.'s Feather ID Lab Studying Snakes?

WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:35:00 -0400

Deep within the bowels of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, scientists at the Feather ID Lab have spent the past four decades studying what happens when humans and birds compete for the same airspace... it's the often messy science of bird-plane collisions, or birdstrikes.

The lab has no shortage of work helping the military and civilian airports determine which birds are colliding with planes, but in the past few years, the lab has also been stepping out of its avian comfort zone, and into the digestive tracts of Burmese pythons.

"I love birds. I didn't think I'd ever be working with Burmese Pythons," says Carla Dove, head of the Smithsonian's Division of Birds. She is a forensic ornithologist by training.

The opportunity to work with prey remains from pythons first arose about five years ago, when researchers at Everglades National Park in Florida wanted to find out if the Burmese Python, an invasive species running amok in Florida swamps, was eating native birds. The answer has been a resounding yes. An early study encompassing about 80 pythons found 25 different species of birds in their stomachs.

"This snake is opportunistic," she says. "It's eating everything in its path."

Pythons first appeared in the Everglades in the late '70s. They're popular exotic pets in Florida, and may have been released by their owners, or escaped from backyard enclosures.

Some estimates put the current Florida population in the tens of thousands, and Dove says the amount of devastation the snake is inflicting on native species makes it hard for her to see it as anything other than the villain of the story.

"I love snakes and all animals, but I have to say, my dislike for the snake has really intensified over the years."

[Music: "Learning to Fly" by Pickin' On Series from Pickin' On Tom Petty ]

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Reimagines Chekhov's The Seagull

WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:30:00 -0400

When it comes to his relationship with Anton Chekhov's classic 1895 play, The Seagull, D.C.-based playwright and director Aaron Posner says it's complicated, particularly for young theater artists.

"It's [The Seagull] about theater, and it's about art and 'I'm going to change the world' and all that," says Posner. "So it was one of my favorite plays." But as he grew older, he says, "it became a less favorite play. And then one that I found pissed me off."

A few years back, when Posner found himself chatting with some theater folks about the play "and why one loves it and hates it," he says he had a sudden brainstorm: to create his own version of The Seagull.

"I should call it Stupid Fucking Bird,'" he says. "And people laughed, and then I went to the bathroom, and in the bathroom I thought, 'I [really] should do my own adaptation of The Seagull, and I [really] should call it Stupid Fucking Bird.' And maybe a month or so later, I started writing."

Longer writing process

That was a few years ago, and since then, Posner has been writing and rewriting, and now his play is premiering this month at Woolly Mammoth Theater, helmed by Woolly's artistic director Howard Shalwitz.

Shalwitz says the cast was working with draft number 8.4 the other day. And indeed, it's common for a playwright to burn through multiple drafts before a play gets on its feet — often before it even starts rehearsals. But in the case of this play, which Shalwitz says they've taken to calling SFB, it's been entirely different.

As Shalwitz explains, with most plays at most American regional theaters, "there's usually a long process with the playwright, a semi-long process with the director, a not-very-long process with the designers, and then a very short three- to four-week process with the actors."

But with SFB, Woolly's been able to bring all those people together over an entire year, "and touch base with the play at different phases of its development. Not just 'Oh, here's the script, and now we're doing a quick production to put it on the stage.'"

Longer rehearsals

The secret? A $4 million fundraising campaign to develop and produce 25 new plays in 10 years, by providing more technical resources, larger casts, extra readings and workshops, and longer rehearsal periods. The campaign is called "Free The Beast."

"I think American directors and American theaters in general are among the best in the world at doing a really good job in a really short period of time, but we also do spend less time working on a play than most other countries do, who have deeper government support and companies of artists who've been sustained over many years through that support.

"So I think that sometimes we rob ourselves of the tools that we could develop if we gave ourselves a little more time to experiment."

That's precisely what Free the Beast has done for SFB: it's given it "more time." And cast member Kimberly Gilbert, who's done a ton of shows around town, says she's felt the difference.

"I think I've done about seven world premieres," Gilbert says. "And ultimately what happens is when you work on a regular rehearsal schedule, you feel that you're ready to open when you close. Because you don't have any time to let things marinate."

But with SFB, the cast started marinating last April, during a weeklong workshop in Lake George, N.Y., and they've done a few more workshops since then. So at the play's first official reading this April, Gilbert says instead of feeling the typical jitters ("Usually I'm sweaty and, you know, heart racing,") she felt right at home.

"It was just as if it was another step in the process," she says. And she admits that, in a way, this process has spoiled her.

"Spoiled, but also ruined, in a way," she says with a laugh. "Like, it's ruined me!"

Playwright Aaron Posner is totally with Kimberly Gilbert on this one. "We've had a great luxury of time," he says. And yet "we could use more time."

For now, though, a little more than a week remains before SFB is up and running. And though the play isn't exactly an "adaptation" of Chekhov, word has it the first-act set includes a big picture of the playwright, more or less overlooking the proceedings. So, love him or hate him, he'll most definitely be there in spirit.

Previews for Stupid Fucking Bird start May 27 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Northwest D.C.

[Music: "Bye Bye Blackbird" by Slim Cooper y su Orquestra from Vintage Dance Orchestras No. 256]

Shawn Westfall Celebrates A Decade Of Teaching Improv Comedy

WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:25:00 -0400

Back in 2003, comedic actor Shawn Westfall started an improvisation comedy school at the DC Improv on Connecticut Avenue along with club manager Allyson Jaffe. What began with a mere 14 students has now graduated nearly 1,800 people. And this past week, Westfall and Jaffe celebrated their 10th anniversary of helping D.C. bring the funny.

A different skill than stand-up comedy, Westfall describes improv as "collaborative comedy made up completely on the spot, based on audience suggestions." And contrary to what one might think, Westfall says the last thing students should do is try to be funny.

"The minute they start trying to funny, trying to be clever, is the minute that their scene will go off the rails," he says. "Primarily because they're up in their heads, thinking about the ways in which they're going to sort of show off their comedic acumen. Well, what they're not doing is paying attention to what's happening in the scene."

And if paying attention to what's happening around you sounds like good life advice as well, it turns out improv lessons are often applied outside the classroom by Westfall's students. The "yes...and" principle in improv instructs students to say "yes" to whatever is being offered on stage "and" build upon that offer.

"Even if you don't take these principles out into the rest of your life, there is something therapeutic about getting together with people who only a few short weeks ago were strangers, tearing these barriers down, laughing with them, laughing at them when they do something completely outrageous on stage," he says. "There is something to that."

[Music: "Fly Me to the Moon" by Beegie Adair from Swingin' With Sinatra]

On The Coast: Making Music On the Fly With Angela Sheik

WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:20:00 -0400

The first instrument singer-songwriter Angela Sheik ever played was her grandmother's piano. She wanted to learn how to play the Star Wars theme song, she says. But she's since branched into more unusual instruments — namely, a theremin and a loop pedal, which she uses to create lush, unique sounds. Sheik recently joined Metro Connection reporter Bryan Russo in the studio to talk about her one-of-a-kind musical style and to show us how to use a loop pedal.

On the art and science of looping:

"I had a different loop pedal for a long time¬ and I was at an electronic music festival and thankfully some guy came up to me, and he said, you should check this pedal out; I think it would really open up the possibilities for you," says Sheik. "I am so grateful for that man. I don't know who it was, but he was so right. It was just such a songwriting tool for me. It kept me from playing a crazy amount of chords. You know? The loop pedal gives you a structure, and I think changed my songwriting.

On using what she calls the queen of boss pedals — the Boss RC-300:

"It's basically three pedals smashed together with some effects, which is going to allow us to take some loops in and out. So we can record something and then we can take it out. You know, trial and error. Rhythm is key, and then you can add harmonies and take them out, and the rhythm will stay.

On defying musical genres:

Sheik says she's influenced by artists like Imogen Heap and Regina Spektor — musicians who defy genre, but she also says she's already had struggles with people who want her to embrace a genre with her own music.

"'What genre?' is the question that they usually ask and I don't have an answer for them. I love the people, especially the women icons that are the genre. Imogen Heap is her own genre. Regina Spektor is her own genre. She made anti-folk in my mind, so yeah, that's what I aspire to be."

[Music: "Sea of Love" by Tom Waits from Brawlers / "Chickadee" by Angela Sheik from Songs From the Red Box]

DCPS Tries New Strategy In Educating Special Ed Students

WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:15:00 -0400

Just a few years ago, about 20 percent of the District's 11,000 special education students were enrolled in private schools because the District couldn't meet their needs. These private school enrollments cost taxpayers about $200 million a year in tuition and transportation. But since the start of this academic year, DCPS has limited private school placements and tried to "mainstream" more students into public schools. DCPS says it's proud of its progress, but there are many parents who feel their children's needs aren't being met. Special correspondent Kavitha Cardoza talked with Metro Connection's Rebecca Sheir to explain the changes. Following are highlights of the conversation.

On why DCPS started to bring special education back into the city's public schools:

"DCPS's new philosophy is 'Better Services, More Kids, Closer to Home.' Last year nearly 1,600 students were placed in private schools; this year it's approximately 1,200, and DCPS wants to reduce that number even more. Nathaniel Beers, the head of special education services for DCPS, says there are instances where private placements are best. But he also says students are generally better served when they are close to their communities."

On how much of the decision is being driven by money:

"Money is definitely part of it. In the past, DCPS spent as much as $150 million per year on these private placements and approximately $60 to $90 million more on these students' transportation. If you look at the breakdown per student, and of course the amount varies widely, it costs approximately $36,000 to educate a child with disabilities in D.C. public schools and twice that in a private setting."

On what teachers are saying about the larger number of special education students in their classrooms:

"I spoke with Nathan Saunders, the head of the Washington Teachers Union, and he says educators are already under so much pressure to teach, so when you add in children who have very specific needs, it's challenging. You may have a child who acts out and disrupts the entire class, or you may have one who has autism and you have never been trained to deal with his or her needs. Saunders says the success is uneven."

On how the parents of the special education students feel about their kids moving out of private schools:

"I think it depends on what the child's needs are. I've heard from parents who are willing to try this out and see how it goes because they like having their child go to their neighborhood school. But there are parents such as Greg Masucci. He went to the city council to speak out because he doesn't feel his child's needs are being met at all."

Listen to the full interview here.

[Music: "Little Wing" by The Electric Guitarcorporation from 22 Strings]

Shock Trauma Docs Grapple With Real-Life Medical Drama

WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:10:00 -0400

Doctors and nurses at the University of Maryland's Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore see more than 8,000 severely injured patients each year. These are people who've been in bad car crashes, suffered gunshot wounds, or taken a serious fall. They arrive for treatment at a place that was the first of its kind when it opened more than 50 years ago. To this day, it's thought to be among the best in the nation.

On a Friday afternoon, the sun is shining on the roof of the Shock Trauma Center in downtown Baltimore. Slowly a helicopter comes into view, and staff run out to help offload the latest patient, a man who fell off a ladder, hit his head, and lost consciousness.

Seconds later, the patient is in the trauma unit downstairs, where about a dozen staff members in pink scrubs swarm around him.

"When things are going well, it's truly like an orchestrated ballet, says anesthesiologist John Blenko. "Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. They know where they are, they know what's just happened, and they know what's coming next. There's no repetition, nothing's missed."

Every patient who rolls through the elevator doors here comes in with grave injuries. So the decisions that doctors and nurses make in an instant can easily mean life or death. Those decisions need to be made fast, and in rapid succession.

"Usually Friday afternoon around 4 o'clock, 4:30, it's like somebody flipped a switch," says Blenko. "Things get busy, and they get busy real fast."

Especially when the weather is nice: people hit the road in cars and on motorcycles, and they hit the streets, and get caught up in violence. This particular afternoon, things do get very busy. Within the course of a few hours, ambulances and helicopters have brought more than a dozen seriously injured patients.

"It's kinda busy. It's not the busiest we've ever been, but it's kinda busy," says Dr. Thomas Scalea, the physician-in-chief in charge of the Shock Trauma Center. At Shock Trauma, doctors don't have the luxury of time to order a bunch of tests, and wait a week for the results.

"We have to make decisions sometimes based not on the greatest information, so you go on a lot of clinical feel, a lot of gut sense."

Everyone in the trauma center seems to thrive on this fast pace. Scalea compares it favorably to a rollercoaster. Nurse Ellen Plummer has another analogy.

"Your adrenaline's going all the time pretty much, and you're almost like a racehorse waiting to go out the gate," says Plummer.

She says as a nurse, you quickly get used to working 12-hour shifts with adrenaline pumping constantly. But for patients, whatever event brought them here was unexpected, and often life changing.

"These patients, and the families, they don't wake up today knowing that they're going to get in a car crash and they're going to get injured," she says. "And they have no preparation for that."

That's the bad part of the job, Plummer says, having to break the news to a family. Or finding a child's note to Santa in the pocket of a woman who just died after a car crash.

"We can't save everybody," she says. "And that's the worst part of this job. Totally the worst part of this job."

Even though they can't save everyone, the doctors and nurses at Shock Trauma do save most. Of the dozens of patients who arrive here in ambulances or helicopters each day, 96 percent survive their injuries.

[Music: "Learning To Fly" by Guitar Tribute Players from Acoustic Tribute to Pink Floyd]

Backpacks For Dragonflies: Inside The Janelia Farm Research Campus

WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:05:00 -0400

In Loudoun County, just off Leesburg Pike, there's a place where hundreds of people "wing it" every day — sometimes in more ways than one.

Anthony Leonardo is one of those people, and today the bespectacled, pony-tailed young scientist has led us to the window of the "Dragonfly Flight Arena," deep within the main building of the Janelia Farm Research Campus.

"The room is 15 feet by 15 feet by 15 feet," he explains. "So it's like a big cube. At the top of the room we have a huge number of very bright lights, and so the room is sort of lit to look like noon on a summer day."

Leonardo has furthered the summer-day theme by keeping the room at a steady 82 degrees, installing artificial grass, and providing a heaping helping of fruit flies for his dragonflies to eat. He's also covered the walls with blown-up photographs of the trees, grass and flowers you'll find all over Janelia Farm's 689 acres.

"So now it has enough appearance of an outdoor realistic environment that dragonflies think, 'this is a good place for me to hang out and forage,'" he says.

Dance of the dragonflies

Leonardo and his team actually catch the dragonflies on the Janelia Campus, which the Howard Hughes Medical Institute built in 2006, so scientists could set up shop in a collaborative and flexible environment.

"It's internally funded, so you don't apply for any grants; there's no teaching," Leonardo says. "So all you have to do is your work."

And if you're the head of a particular lab, as Anthony Leonardo is, you're pretty much given free rein to study whatever you fancy for a renewable period of five years. And a topic — that's long fascinated Leonardo is this idea of prey capture.

"Prey capture is essentially a problem of predicting where a moving target is going to be in the future," he says. "So this is both a challenging problem, but also a deeply interesting one because prediction is sort of a fundamentally interesting thing about what people and other animals do: you're trying to figure out what's going to happen in the future."

While that's happening, there's so much going on, and so much that scientists don't yet understand. It's like a highly choreographed dance of senses sensing, neurons firing and muscles responding.

"This is sort of analogous to a football player catching a ball," Leonardo says. "And so the objective of the football player is really to watch that motion and alter its own body movement to reach it as some future time coordinate."

Not a bad metaphor, but when you're talking about motion, there's a major difference between footballs and fruit flies — the latter of which, by the way, Leonardo gets from some of his fruit-fly scientist buddies upstairs.

Monitoring dragonflies

Leonardo says dragonflies are the most sophisticated hunting and flying machines in nature: "Outdoors, they catch maybe 95 percent of what they go after, which is phenomenal," he says. "Something like a lion does like 15 percent."

Here's the thing, though: compared with a lion, or that football player, dragonflies are tiny. But not so tiny they can't carry a miniature wireless system that records and transmits their neural activity as they zoom around. Leonardo calls it a "telemetry backpack."

"The first two generations of this thing we also called a backpack, and we attached it on the other side of the body," he explains. "This caused great confusion for everybody because they were like 'It's a front pack!' So now it literally is a backpack."

Granted, it doesn't have padded, adjustable straps and a pocket for your cell phone, but it does have this little computer chip with electrodes that go into the back of the anaesthetized dragonfly. Once the animal starts flying and foraging, the backpack detects and sends out signals from what Leonardo calls the "steering neurons."

"The animal's going to fly, catch things, and we're going to monitor the signals coming out of these neurons while the animal's doing it," Leonardo says.

He and his team also shoot videos of the animal — at a whopping 1,000 frames per second — to get a more macroscopic view of what's going on. What they're looking for are things such as how the body moves through the air toward the prey, why the flight pattern looks like, and how it moves through space.

Once Leonardo goes through all the videos, and analyzes all the signals from the backpack, his next job is to look at all that data and figure out what it all means.

"We have lots of ideas and models for how to do that," he says. "But at least you can kind of measure all of the relevant information. And then you have the greatest hope probably of ever actually understanding mechanistically how the pieces are combined."

Anthony Leonardo says he doesn't have all 10,000 pieces yet, but he's well on his way. And he'll find out soon if he'll be able to get closer, since his Janelia Farm contract goes up for renewal in July 2014.

[Music: "On the Wing" by Owl City from Ocean Eyes]

This Week On Metro Connection: Winging It

WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:00:00 -0400

Metro Connection Segments

We'll visit a local shock trauma center to meet doctors and nurses who work on the fly to save lives. We'll hear from a longtime D.C.-based teacher of improv comedy. And we'll hang out with a musician who's all about experimentation and play. We'll also take a more literal look at the idea of winging it, with stories about creatures that take to the skies.

[Music: "Every Little Bit Hurts" by John Davis from Title Tracks]

Door To Door: Arlington Ridge, Va. And Hawthorne, D.C.

WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio — Fri, 10 May 2013 07:40:00 -0400

It's our weekly trip around the region. This time around, we visit Arlington Ridge, Va., and the Hawthorne neighborhood of Northwest D.C.

Hawthorne, Washington, D.C.

When Marianne Becton walks out of her house in the Hawthorne neighborhood of Washington, D.C., to walk her dog, she doesn't see the rush of people and vehicles that defines the city.

"[There's] a lot of green space," Becton says. "A lot of children. A lot of mature trees. Well-managed homes. A lot of people walking. And of course, a proximity to the park, so we get to see the park every day."

That natural beauty is Becton's favorite part of Hawthorne, which sits close to the Pine Hurst Tributary in Chevy Chase. But what has surprised Becton is the amount of diversity in the area.

"I think Hawthorne represents a really mixed bag," Becton says. "All kinds of people live here. There are older retirees here. A lot of young families have come in in the past several years. Blue collar, white collar. We have every kind of demographic mix, age, every racial mix. A very diverse neighborhood."

Becton says that she loves that mix of people, carrying with them a variety of experiences and personalities. And she says that her neighbors are caring, something you don't normally see in a bustling city.

"So I think when people think about cities, they think that it's probably so fast-paced and not as kind and not as gentle, and this neighborhood is very kind and very gentle."

Arlington Ridge, Virginia

Katie Buck has had a connection with Arlington Ridge since 1983, when her parents purchased a house in the community in Arlington County. When they passed away, Buck moved into the house and renovated it, excited about living in a community so full of history.

"The history of Arlington Ridge is very rich. It dates back to the Revolutionary and Civil Wars," Buck says. "Fort Scott Park was a park during the Civil War where the Union built a fort to protect Washington."

Buck says the town is full of historic architecture, including the Hume School, the oldest school in Arlington County. But Buck says that Arlington Ridge isn't just a neighborhood full of century-old buildings and homes.

"The architecture is very mixed in Arlington Ridge," Buck says. "We have a number of homes that are nearing 100 years in age that were built for people to have vacation homes up on the ridge overlooking the Potomac River. And, of course, like any community, we've been experiencing a number of renovations occurring, as well as some teardowns and new homes being built."

But that history isn't Buck's favorite part of living in Arlington Ridge. Instead, she loves its location as a quiet community surrounded by big cities.

"I love living in Arlington Ridge because we have great accessibility to Washington, D.C., Alexandria, the national airport," Buck says. "And yet we are an old community with strong neighbors and beautiful homes and trees."

[Music: "No, Girl" by John Davis from Title Tracks / "Mamma Mia" by ABBA from Karaoke]