March 24, 2026

Where: Pennsylvania Avenue, DC

When: 1:00pm

Bird Species: house sparrow. American robin. rock pigeon

Things I Thought About:

• When we get to the end of the year and scroll back through all 365 birds, we will find that Tuesdays are the bad and boring ones. 
• I play pub trivia on Tuesdays, so I flex in a little earlier and then go directly from downtown DC to metro to car to pub for a 6:30 start, while encountering nary a bird that isn’t hanging around the office. 
• If I ever sell merch, is “TUESDAYS ARE FOR PARKING LOT BIRDS” with a photo of pigeons hanging around smoking cigarettes a good t-shirt idea?
• House sparrow, American robin, pigeon. I like all these birds, but I suspect they will pall with repetition.
• The house sparrows that live at a house are a million times cleaner than the house sparrows that live at the WWI Memorial. These birds are filthy. I like how every time I see them here, they are all a little damp, like they’ve been trying to clean up in the fountain.

• I think the skin on my face looks better than it has in five years, mostly because I have been moisturizing relentlessly and because I have stopped wearing full coverage makeup. Not so much a new year’s resolution, as a “in 2026 why bother?” that really paid off. Even though I decided this when I was never on camera and mostly working from home, it turns out that my face can stand up to the rigors of in-office a few days a week. I think I had forgotten that I can look cute when I put on real clothes and some lipstick.
• The skin on my throat and chest still looks like the Arizona desert. It’s almost enough to make me wish I hadn’t smoked 30 cigarettes a day for 23 years.
• I have been a woman for five decades, and I still think about my looks constantly. Fuck the patriarchy, amirite. 
• That….is the ugliest pigeon I have ever seen in my life.  Why is it brown? I am going to spend all afternoon trying to figure out why it is brown.

BOTD: a brown rock pigeon. Now, listen. It's awful. There was NO WAY I was going to let that hideous bird be the Bird of the Day, and then at Quiz I spent a full four minutes describing it, telling my sister how gross I thought it was, how it looked like a band-aid with dried blood on it, how the sparkly, lavender neck band actively clashes with its main color, which is Bruise. I guess that's the bird of the day, if you can't stop talking about it?

Turns out, that nasty light brown with a white rump is quite a common coloration, which comes from generations of interbreeding with fancy pigeons. Was I shocked to learn that "fancy pigeon" is a term of art, referring to any domesticated pigeon, as opposed to the common rock pigeon, which is considered a "feral pigeon?" Believe it. Although in humble consideration, "fancy" and "feral" are the two wolves within me, as well.

This pigeon is disgusting.