March 19, 2025

Where: Lake Accotink Park

When: 5:40pm

Bird Species: common raven, turkey vulture (flyover) northern cardinal, Carolina chickadee, red-bellied woodpecker, Canada goose, double-crested cormorant, ring-billed gull, red-winged blackbird, song sparrow, house sparrow, American robin, eastern phoebe, mourning dove. Heard but not seen: white-throated sparrow, northern fucking flicker

Things I Thought About:

• This park has a sign that changes by the half hour with the turning of the earth around the sun. In December GATES LOCK AT 5:00PM, and it’s been creeping back up. Last time I was here GATES LOCK AT 6:30PM. Tonight it’s 7:30PM. 
• The sign on the inside of the gate reads THE PARK CLOSES AT DARK. WE HAVE ATTEMPTED TO LOCATE YOU, which can you imagine encountering while not being able to leave? Extremely ominous.
• What the actual fuck?? The minute I get out of my car I hear an absolutely insane, grinding, hacking call, loud and close, and watch two dogs on a leash jump and hide behind each other. I fully run up the hill and see it just in time for it to take off across the railroad trestle and away. It really was a raven, and it was fucking HUGE.
• The man with dogs, another man, and I convene on the trail to discuss the raven. “He has never heard that call before in his life, I’ll tell you that,” he says, petting the one dog that is still rattled. We jointly confirm the ID with our various apps, including recordings of the call, and we all list it in eBird or Merlin. Merlin used to just throw up an icon to represent “rare” or “uncommon” but now has a more nuanced “Unlikely, for where you are, at this time.”
• One of the dogs is a beagle and he calls the other a “boggle”, which I have never heard in my life. She is a beagle-bassett hound mix and she is perfect. Good dogs are good.
• I like Canada geese. I know they are primarily noted for shitting all over the place and for never shutting up, but they are very soothing to watch, especially when the beagle and the boggle frighten them into the water at some speed.

• Saying “the beagle and the boggle” out loud to my text app makes me think of Danny Kaye in The Court Jester. “The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle,” etc.
• Glynnis Johns in The Court Jester is probably the earliest vintage of long-haired brunette women I am obsessed with. Every day I wake up a little disappointed that I don’t look like Rachel Weisz. 
• Red-winged blackbird! First male with full epaulets I've seen up close this season, although God knows I've heard plenty. These maniacs take such a nice photo.

• Some people come to the park to take their personal calls about medical conditions, and if I live to be one hundred I will never understand it.
• When I got here, I was thinking about work, where I actually managed to contribute a bit today, but it's so pretty out and the sun is sinking in a way that is turning one whole side of the lake a warm amber. Now I’m just thinking about boats.
• Will another summer pass without being invited on a boat? I miss being a dumb young slut, I got invited onto boats all the time in the nineties. 9/11 really did change everything.
• Ohhhh, a white-throated sparrow! Alone of all birds, their song cuts through the clutter for me. It's so sweet and sad and singular.
• Every time I hear a white-throated sparrow I think Hank Williams pain songs and Newbury’s train songs, and blue eyes crying in the rain, a lyric from Luckenbach, Texas, which I learned from the 1981 Chipmunks album, Urban Chipmunk.
• Look at that cormorant out there in the forbidden zone. You can’t tell him anything.

• The sun has continued to sink and only the tops of the trees on my left are amber and lit now, too far away or too dark for the camera. I can hear a phoebe, and there she is, but just a silhouette against the lake.
• This dusky forest light is terrible for photos, but it’s perfectly lovely for walking along, slowly as you like, relishing the way you don’t need gloves or a hat even though you're completely in shade now, and listing the birds, sparrow, phoebe, robin, dove, softly into the phone mic, like an incantation.

BOTD: the common raven. Look, I took better pictures at Accotink tonight, and had a terrific photo session with a wren in my own yard at lunchtime that you won't even see today. That featured photo sucks, but this blog isn't the Bird Photo of the Day.

One reason to get into birds is the exhilaration of "What the fuck??" moments like that. It's thrilling, even when you have no idea what you're hearing, but when you know, when you say to yourself, "Holy shit, I think that's a GODDAMN RAVEN" and you're right and people agree and it is one, it's like winning a jackpot. So much fun. The only thing that tops it is seeing a bird and saying "What the fuck??" and then realizing, yep, that really is something completely out of the ordinary. The world is still rich in surprises of the pleasant variety, too.

I don't have any idea why there was a fucking raven at Lake Accotink today. There was one out at Huntley two summers ago, the only other one I ever saw, and it was very strange for it to be there, too. It isn't technically out of range, I don't suppose, just...there aren't supposed to be any around here.

Any time you see an Unlikely Bird, that's your Bird of the Day.