February 21, 2026

Where: Huntley Meadows Park

When: 10:20am - 1:40pm

Bird Species: song sparrow, swamp sparrow, red-bellied woodpecker, Carolina chickadee, Canada goose, mallard, northern pintail, green-winged teal, hooded merganser, red-winged blackbird, northern shoveler, ring-billed gull, red-headed woodpecker, downy woodpecker, great horned owl, eastern bluebird, white-throated sparrow, northern cardinal

Things I Thought About:

• Ducks. Man, I love ducks. If I ever get to be an old person, I want to look at ducks every day, like retired spies in old movies. I’d never feed them bread. 
• A young couple out for a Saturday stroll, barely looking around, talking non-stop. The young woman is earnestly explaining how we just went and put fluoride in all the water in the seventies like it was proven science, but it wasn’t. The young man is nodding, nodding. 
• Otherwise, the only topic of conversation today at the wetland is how wonderful it is to see so much water, with all the ponds and washes filled up. We all tell stories about the year when we saw a herd of deer walk right across the main pond, was that 2019? But all five ponds are full today and there are ducks in every one of them.
• There is simply no duck I do not like. I also like Canada geese. The first pond is featuring mallards, Canada geese, and pintails, and friends, it is goose fight season. They puff their chests up as big as they can and flap their wings and splash each other and I could watch them all day.

• The last pond that hasn't completely unfrozen has been entirely overtaken by a flock of ring-billed gulls. A bunch of bluegills did not survive the freeze and have risen up to just below the ice. The gulls are bombing the ice and pecking holes and dragging them out, gnawing, flying away with other gulls in pursuit. One will drop the prize, and two will grab it up. There's a lot of scrapping for the scraps. It looks like a game more than competition; there is more than enough for all of them. It's very dramatic and a little disgusting.

• The difference between seeing gulls in a wetland sanctuary and seeing gulls at, say, the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk, is a chasm. I've always liked their raucous calls and their sturdy little bodies, and it's fun to see them eating fish instead of garbage, for once.
• Five species of ducks today! Northern Shovelers: my absolute favorite. Beautiful coloring, and that huge spoon-shaped bill. They are an enormously dignified bird, and they look so goofy. I love him.

• Mallards: the female is very beautiful, but the green heads are really popping on the males today. This is sex, I think. Look at the way she's simping for him.

• Northern Pintails: this is an exquisite duck, which I have previously held to have zero personality. Today the geese ran up on them, though, so I have changed my opinion. They do have a personality, and it is beta through and through.

• Green-winged teals: these guys were in the back pond, and impossible to dial in. The green patch is iridescent, almost mint green on a sunny day, which we did not have today.

• Hooded mergansers: a male grabbed a fish about a third of his own body size and struggled with it comically for ten minutes. His female was fabulously unbothered by this.

• And that's it for the ponds, time to try the woods trail. Always a little dead this time of day, but you never know. There's the redheaded woodpecker, which is always nice to see. And I see a human couple with a tripod emerging happily from the other little trail branch. You can't really go wrong following in the steps of the crew with the 600x lenses.

BOTD: Great horned owl. I mean, obviously. The people with the tripods had been sitting there for hours, watching her give them nothing. I have to admire it. This babe is so perfectly situated in the woods and so comfortable in her nest you don't even need binos to see her, those incredible ear tufts are fully visible to the naked eye. I'm so glad I saw her today; within a week there will be 20 tripods set up by that nest. What a genuine treat.

Otherwise it would have been a five-way tie between the ducks. Maybe the gulls, too. Waterfowl weekend. Cloudy with a chance of owl.