April 8, 2026

Where: Dunn Loring Community Park

When: 6:12pm

Bird Species: northern cardinal, eastern towhee, tufted titmouse, American crow, Carolina wren, house sparrow, eastern bluebird, red-bellied woodpecker, American robin

Things I Thought About:

• I walked a bit before work this morning and got a nice photo of that female cardinal, so today is covered, but my body craves a walk outside. I think my thing is I'm happy to work a ten-hour day, just not in a row.
• Surely nobody noticed that I sent the newsletter yesterday dated "2027." If they even noticed, which they didn't, I covered my tracks perfectly by updating it on the site. Plus, they probably assumed that like the Mothman, I have seen the future and there are still birds.
• I have never been to this park before. I have picked it because it popped up in my maps app as being a 3-minute drive from my Metro stop. Looks small, though. A tryout. I am auditioning this park.
• Oh, I can hear a million birds. A lot of them will be backlit but what the FUCK
• There was a deer completely lying down flat, I guess? It stood up and exploded out of a bunch of low green bushes that seemed too short to have hid it. It scared a year off my life, but I always like to see a deer, despite having been in the car for a truly ghastly and upsetting accident with one on a Georgia backroad.
• Well, one of these is going to be about the best photo of a titmouse I've ever taken in my life.

• This park is very small, but the terrain is perfect: a lot of fallen trees and a lot of green and some open space, very tall trees and some brushy areas by the tennis court. Lots of pretty places for a bird to post up, on a log, on a green branch. There is one route on a paved road that runs through the middle, no longer than two suburban blocks, but it is packed with life.
• Whyyyyyyy do I always get a better photo of a bird the day after they're BOTD?

• Eastern towhees are an expensive looking bird. Their colors are rich. The female especially, with her dark mink brown and caramel feathers. Their plumage looks thick and high quality. Too bad this married couple is staying on the dark side of the path.
• Lost time! Like in The Mothman Prophecies. I never would have guessed I could spend 87 minutes in a park this small.

BOTD: the eastern towhee. This is such a fun bird, really underrated. A beautiful repertoire of songs and calls, including one this evening that is a twannnng like a mouth harp. The males are black and caramel, the female brown and caramel, with white underbellies. That warm brown color is "rufous-sided" in the bird world, but she looks like a delicious Russell Stover chocolate to me.

They are SO noisy. They dig, and by "dig" I mean "use their beak to grab up huge hunks of dead leaves and dirt and twigs and ground matting and throw them all around higgledy-piggledy." And they hop, so even more crunching noises in the underbrush. One towhee in the brush can sound as big as a squirrel, and a married couple, which these were, can sound like ten. A very charismatic bird; bold look, bold personality. They take up a lot of space.

In this photo, the setting sun makes it genuinely tough to tell if this was the male or the female (both of them were all over the place) but I love that I caught it mid-call, the "twHEEE" that they are famous for.