January 3, 2026

Where: Cross County Trail - Wakefield Park towards Accotink

When: 12:17pm - 1:42pm (was watching my new Garmin)

Bird species: white-throated sparrow, tufted titmouse, pileated woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker, Canada goose, Northern cardinal, Carolina chickadee, northern mockingbird, downy woodpecker.

Things I Thought About:

• My car door latch doesn't feel securely latched. I have an appointment at the garage Monday, but in the meantime I worry it will blow open on the beltway. There are a dozen YouTube videos showing how to replace this, but I simply do not trust myself. I cannot tell if this is wise or a self-esteem problem.
• There are seven kinds of woodpecker a person can see around here, and I see at least two or three every time I walk anywhere. Today I found where two red-bellied woodpeckers are making a nest. This is a project for me now. I need to keep checking in. Once again, I hear a Northern flicker but have no idea where he is. Unbelievable that on a day where I see a married couple (one has a red stripe on the mustache) of pileated woodpeckers they aren't the BOTD.
• When my niece was very young I got into the habit of describing boy and girl mallards as being married, and now I do this unironically with all male/female birds in the wild.
• In October I had a nice chat with a pair of quite elderly married humans and got to explain to them the meaning of "cuffing season" and whether or not that can apply to birds (the verdict? not quite.) They were delighted with both the name and the concept. "She cuffed me!" he, for want of a better verb, crowed.
• The way I am always theorizing how someone would attack me when I have to go under the road here:

• You might think "lay down flat at the top where whosis got sucked out in Twisters and then charge" but if I was the sex criminal and murderer I'd come up from the water side and over the rail, which is always loose. So which hand do you hold the pepper spray in?
• It must be cool to be a large man who has solo hobbies.
• A good phrase to popularize would be "like Canada geese on a ball field" to describe something that is basically harmless, incredibly common, and completely incorrect. I can't think of the right use case yet, but I'll be keeping an eye out for opportunities.

BOTD: Northern Cardinal. I didn't used to like them. I still think the males have real Johnny Bravo energy, and I do regularly describe the female as "a bedizened hussy." That's because she's somehow both very muted and very gaudy, and when I see her in the spring she is always being pursued by three or four males who fight while she just watches, even if the rest of the year you never see one without the other.

Then I found out that they actually pair bond and are monogamous, always for a season and sometimes for life, which for cardinals is maybe four years. The way she picks a mate is to let him feed her. And they co-parent. So good for her, if she loses a monogamous mate and lets the other boys try to win her over by feeding her seeds one at a time in the spring. The uncuffing/re-cuffing season.