June 27, 2026

Where: Lake Accotink Marina

When: 12:35 pm

Bird Species: green heron, red-winged blackbird, house sparrow, Canada goose, barn swallow, great blue heron, Carolina chickadee, common raven

Things I Thought About:

• Oh, it is gross.
• This is a little bit exciting, because although I know I won't see any new or unusual birds, I am meeting my sister, who hasn't been listing very long, and some of these birds might be lifers for her.
• The first bird I see is a great blue heron, very high up in a tree. He looks cool.

• The thing about humidity like this is it's okay, you can manage it, you can internally chant "this is fat, this is poison" as you feel sweat leaking out of every pore, and then when you stop moving for ten seconds you are an absolute dripping nightmare, a slime monster.
• Barn swallow on the boat ramp. A lifer for my sister. Very fun.
• Yesterday I was walking outside, and it started to rain, steady but not too heavy to enjoy. Not a drizzle, a real rain. On my way back to the house it started getting heavier, enough for me to tuck my camera inside my clothes and wondering if my pink t-shirt was going to go see-through, I get to my front door and it is fully pouring. And that is when I heard...an ice-cream truck.
• I am thinking about this, telling my sister about it, because I think there is no word to describe "hearing an ice cream truck in the pouring rain."
• I mean, "incongruous" is the adjective, for sure. She supplied that immediately and it was one hundred percent correct. But that doesn't account for the feeling it invokes. It isn't "eerie" or "somber" or "melancholy" or "disorienting," but it's a little bit of all of those. It isn't "ironic," but it also isn't the feeling Alannis Morissette was invoking in her song "Ironic" (which everyone understands but about which people love to be annoying pedants.)
• I may have unlocked an entirely new emotion: the feeling you get when you hear an ice cream truck in the pouring rain. An appreciation of comic futility, and a dash of wistfulness, and also, I kind of want some ice cream.
• I am so bad at describing things. I am trying to describe a feeling, I am trying to describe where Rebecca should look to see the heron "out there, see the white stone that looks like a block, and then to the left it's like an oval, no, I think too far, it's goes darker on the end?"
• Everything makes perfect sense in my brain, which is a strange world that no other human will ever inhabit.

• We can hear a common raven, which is a very cool, very uncommon bird around here. I have been talking about this with other birders lately; there is one at Huntley right now and this one has been around for a while. Technically they aren't out of range, they just haven't been residents of FFX county until recently. It would be very cool if they became so; that call is out of this world.
• Rebecca is showing me an Instagram raven she follows. I don't know how anyone with a raven doesn't name it Edgar.
• Goddamn, I am a disgusting sweat monster. Here is a hot tip that only a daily birdwatcher of my experience and expertise could clock: 1 pm in June is a stupid fucking time to look at birds in the malarial swamp that is Northern Virginia.

BOTD: red-winged blackbird. The females are notoriously misidentified, because they look like a default bird.

My sister kept asking me, "What's making that noise?" "Who's doing that whistling?" "Now, what's that one in the bush?" and the answer was always "Red-winged blackbird." Everyone knows the male make those great screeching cries, but they all make a lot of other noises too, and constantly.

When Hallmark made their birding movie, they used red-wing blackbird for one of the birds, and it was so funny that they used the female, that looks like it could be any old bird. I have to assume it's because the males wouldn't stop screaming.

Rebecca listed two lifers, the swallow and the green heron. She had also listed her first pileated earlier in the day. Big day for her. My good influence coming to bear here, as I'm sure she will agree as she is reading this sentence.