June 11, 2026

Where: Lake Accotink Marina

When: 6:00 pm

Bird Species: Carolina wren, northern cardinal, northern mockingbird, American robin, house sparrow, Carolina chickadee, northern flicker, blue-gray-gnatcatcher, Canada goose, barn swallow, red-winged blackbird, European starling

Things I Thought About:

• [drumroll] I had an okay day at work.
• Carolina wrens are having a moment. I've been seeing a ton of them lately.
• What a wild way to talk about birds, like they're trends.
• Amusing myself by walking around narrating like Stefon on SNL. "This park has everything: northern cardinals, a chipmunk being sassy, and a shirtless 60-year-old talking about 'the finance intern' on bluetooth."
• The baby goslings are real little gooses now. Still a bit of fuzz around the neck, and the colors on the head coming in slow, but that's it.

• It is so, so hot. I have on a long sleeve thin hoodie to keep the sun and ticks off, it's basically weightless, but I am sweating and beet red. I want one of those ones that stay cold all day. I wonder how those work.
• Now here is a bird doing two of the things I told you birds do: managing heat through a wide-open mouth and sitting in a fence. This is very gratifying.

• I am also breathing heavily through a wide-open mouth, attempting to manage the heat.
• At the start of the walk, I had the camera settings all awry, but see a flicker, post a flicker.

• There is a healthy handful of chickadees, gnatcatchers, and sparrows all in this one tree. I bet I get a lot of good photos of the underside of them.

BOTD: Carolina chickadee. I actually didn't get too many good photos of either the top or the bottom of them. I did spend a lot of time wandering around under that tree though, which was nice.

There were a lot of them; I think I counted eight. A nice little flock, and a couple of blue-gray gnatcatchers and a house sparrow as well.