March 21, 2026

Where: Huntley Meadows Park

When: 6:50am

Bird Species: (takes deep breath) red-bellied woodpecker, tufted titmouse, Carolina wren, mourning dove, northern cardinal, downy woodpecker, song sparrow, swamp sparrow, northern mockingbird, mallard, rusty blackbird, Canada goose, turkey vulture, red-shouldered hawk, eastern bluebird, Carolina chickadee, wood duck, hooded merganser, green-winged teal, eastern phoebe, great blue heron, tree swallow, American coot, osprey, red-headed woodpecker, great horned owl, white-throated sparrow, red-winged blackbird

Things I Thought About:

• Standing in the parking lot, I can hear a red-bellied woodpecker, Carolina wren, tufted titmouse, cardinal, mourning dove, and a robin, but I cannot see any of them. It’s still not quite sunrise. 
• It rained quite a bit last night, and now drips and drops are falling off the trees all around, rattling the branches and brush piles. I lean back and look straight up for a titmouse I'm hearing, and a raindrop falls directly into my mouth and down my throat. The half a second when it was not clear if it was a raindrop or a titmouse turd was fraught.
• I forgot a bandana. I lead a very Tick-Aware lifestyle, and for the first time this year I put on insect repellant before heading out, but after months of knit caps I am very aware of my bare noggin out, begging for bird droppings and sunburn and ticks and other disasters. I need Lyme disease like I need a hole in the head.
• I think titmice are top of my shitlist now. I see half a dozen at every bend in the trail and none of them want to cooperate for me.
• There is so much bird song today! I think of calls and songs in a bunch of different categories. There are ratchets (woodpeckers, nuthatch), wails (doves, owls), squawks (crows, blackbirds), look-at-mes (cardinal, titmouse.) I can hear every variety and more, the song sparrows that sound like ringtones, chickadees that sound like buzzers, the ducks that sound like...ducks.
• I think people would be surprised at how authentically the popular cartoon character Donald Duck sounds like a mallard.
• Why isn’t his head green?
• Why isn’t Donald Duck's head green?
• Is Donald Duck a pekin duck?
• I am going to think about this a lot.
• The thing that is wild to me about this wetland park is how people will come here just for exercise. They will walk the boardwalk loop and never slow down or even look around. I came to a full stop during a 5K race to look at some barn swallows.
• It smells good out here today, too. Like when you come home from camp with a slightly wet swimsuit in your suitcase, not quite mildew, but a very damp but not unpleasant smell of natural decay. 
• My first snake of the year. We are so back, baby.
• I always hear a lot of interesting conversations out here, but today most people are talking about the parking. The owl has produced two owlets, apparently, and word is out. People are coming in from all over, and to a man, I hate them with my life. They all have huge lenses and big backpacks, and they aren’t looking for anything other than the owl.
• One loud woman asked what we were looking at, and when someone replied quietly “red-headed woodpecker” she scoffed. She literally scoffed. “I see those all the time.” Me too, you nickel-plated bitch, but it’s still fucking dope to see one. They are black and white and red all over! They always stay high up and the sky is a perfect brilliant blue! And you have a 1200 lens, take a breath and take a picture, you asshole.

• She’s carrying her lens on her shoulder, it’s obviously much too heavy for her and I hope she drops it. 
• Oh, oh! Swallows are back!
• The first time I saw a tree swallow I really had no idea what kind of bird that was, and I had never seen a bird act remotely like them. I was simply gobsmacked by how fast and fairy-like, almost alien they seemed. I had parked my car at Blackwater NWR and gotten out, and four of them just kind of put on a show, quite close to me, all green on tops and white when they loop and turn, and all I could think was “This is Ferngully."
• I can occasionally get a photo of a barn swallow, but I’ll never catch a tree swallow, they never stop swooping and gliding around. What a treat to welcome them back.
• Hahaha, the red-headed woodpecker eschewer was coming from the other direction and two photographers, both of which I have seen here often, put their cameras down and pretended to be talking to each other until she passed. I had heard that the local photographers could be territorial, but I never saw it until now.
• I love being a hater.
• I have been thinking for about 20 minutes that the trees need more foliage because I have to pee terribly and there’s nowhere to go except back to the portalets all the way back in the parking lot. Now I'm here at the owl’s nest, and I swear I could walk 6 feet away on the other side of the trail from her and no one would even turn their head.

• I have to start doing my Achilles bursitis PT again.
• I recently told someone I was texting that my ankle bursitis was my Achilles heel and he did not get the reference. The apps are garbage.
• One time, years ago, someone was telling an extremely tedious story and I was attempting to get her to move it along. She said, “Who’s telling this story?” and I said, “The Ancient Mariner?” and there was no one around to hear it. This was in 2004 and I have never gotten over it.
• I might have 25 species today. 

BOTD: the wood duck. Not in my top ten favorite ducks. They have too much going on. Too many color blocks, too many angles in their heads. A gadwall is a good duck. A mallard is a good duck. Common mergansers are a good duck. Hooded mergansers? Getting a little out of pocket, imho. If I ever see a mandarin, I bet I'll hate it.

But the wood duck is the bird of the day because I haven't featured one before, I got the male and female in the same shot, and they certainly are distinctive.

Pals, I took 220 photos today, and all of them were bad! Except the owl, I did try there, if only to spite the out-of-towners, with whom the locals were not sharing information. The swallows were hopeless, the coot is a damn weird bird, the light was too high or too low everywhere I looked, the auto-focus couldn't keep up with their speed and I did a bad job manually. I saw an osprey for like six seconds.

It was still my favorite walk I've had in weeks. Abundant with sounds and smells and colors and sun. I took my hoodie off before 9AM. And the snakes and snappers are awake and the swallows are back. Happy spring equinox, y'all.