April 23, 2026

Where: Smithsonian Castle Gardens

When: 5:48 pm

Bird Species: American robin, northern cardinal, northern mockingbird, common grackle, European starling, house sparrow, white-throated sparrow, eastern towhee, mallard, mourning dove

Things I Thought About:

• What do spies exchange now that no one carries attaché cases anymore? I have never seen a 70-year-old man with a backpack. Gym bags, probably. I do see older gentlemen with gym bags.
• This would a good place for a spy exchange, nice little tables, people around, but quiet people and not a lot of them. The garden has kind of an alley of cafe tables, so you could see a tail coming from a long way away. Public, but secluded. You could sit and have your nice lunch and also do some light espionage and treason.
• It would also be a pretty good place to have an affair. You could get fingered under the table as easily as you could exchange the microfilm under the table. If you are addicted to danger and bad decisions, as all spies and affair partners are. In fiction, at least.
• I am going to sit on this bench and read while this grackle stares at me. He's not my boss.

• The mystery I am reading features two men who have left their wives for a younger model, under vastly different circumstances, and Elizabeth George, a phenomenal novelist, treats them both with such compassion, as she does all her characters, while also completely exposing their flaws and bone-headedness and deceit. I haven't seen either of the British series, but the Lynley novels are so, so good.
• Inspector Lynley cannot catch a break.
• There is a female mallard by herself in the water feature here. Unprecedented. Madam, where is your husband. They are all running wild these days.
• The grackle has flown behind me and posed up on the edge of the moongate wall. Still looks thoroughly disaffected with me.

• Sergeant Barbara Havers also cannot catch a break, but she could solve a lot of her problems with a Stitch Fix subscription.
• Isn't it cool the way everyone has always read the same twenty-one book series of English mysteries? That way talking about them is always interesting, and also relatable.

BOTD: northern mockingbird. I thought for a while it would be the grackle, and I was delighted to show it off, but there were a couple of mockers hanging around tonight, and they were terrorizing the whole garden. Here, there, everywhere; they were fighting with starlings on the ground, they were running robins out of trees, that one was positively Godzilla-ing his way through a freshly planted flower bed.

I believe there is a nest somewhere behind the castle, because robins were regularly exploding out of the trees in a certain area with a mockingbird in hissing pursuit. He'd then retreat and perch up, just watching the back of the building, on guard.

A pair of robins strafed a girl having photos taken in a graduation gown as they fled, waist-high and close. She shrieked. It was very funny. Two mockingbirds were absolutely running the place. Even people who weren't watching the birds (everyone but me, seemed like) noticed. Good times.