March 6, 2026

Where: Huntley Meadows Park

When: 11:20am -2:45pm

Bird Species: downy woodpecker, mourning dove, northern cardinal, tufted titmouse, pileated woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker, red-headed woodpecker, Canada geese, mallard, red-shouldered hawk, green-winged teal, northern shoveler, gadwall, hooded merganser, ring-billed gull, swamp sparrow, song sparrow, white-throated sparrow, osprey, American coot, great horned owl

Things I Thought About:

• I have things on my mind today, but I am determined to shed them as quickly as possible. 
• This may be a binos day and not a camera day. It’s another very gray day.
• It is honestly humiliating, what a simple organism I am. When it is sunny, I am sunny. When it is gloomy, I am gloomy. The difference in how I feel when I drink a lot of water and eat good food compared to the booze and snacking I’ve been doing lately is annoying. I might as well be a fern.
• This is the exact same experience with the pileated as I had the last time I was here, and in the exact same place. Saw him, framed him up, looked away a second, lost it completely. There’s a secret door out there.
• A feeling I would not have guessed was possible five years ago, but with which I am now intimately familiar, is I am annoyed at one specific, individual bird.
• Other feelings the birdwatcher will recognize are you can’t get mad at children for using their outside voices when they are outside and I have made myself very still and calm and it’s now completely quiet and I still can’t hear any fucking birds. All of these have to do with patience and calm, all of which have improved by leaps and bounds for me in the last couple of years, but I have now made it almost to the boardwalk and I have seen maybe four species. 
• So the redheaded woodpecker has come down much closer to eye-level than usual, a tiny but beautifully bold splash of red and white against all the brown and gray. This is very nice. Get the woodpeckers off my shit list.

• I see mallard, hoodies, gadwalls, shovelers, teals, and our old pal Canada geese. Also a ring-billed gull tearing a fish to shreds right on the boardwalk, being disgusting and an absolute menace. I would like to officially rescind the nice things I said about gulls last month. Go to the beach, you fool.
• Heyyyyy, finally a nice photo of a teal! Things are looking up.

• Now here is a celebrity duck! She returns to this sanctuary every year, multiple years now, and is variously listed as a hybrid mallard x American black duck, or as a Cayuga duck hen, wildly out of range. Every single birder I have spoken to about her, every post in the Facebook group, mentions that she has had many ducklings here every spring for four years and that snapping turtles have eaten every single one of them. She and her husband, a domestic mallard, have attained mythic status, by which I mean Greek mythology. Good luck this year!

• You cannot be mad at a snapping turtle for being a snapping turtle.
• OSPREY OSPREY OSPREY OSPREY OSPREY
• I am going to talk about ospreys on the blog for seventy-five paragraphs.
• I never like to say I have a favorite bird, but there is no bird I like more than an osprey.
• Ospreys migrate, and they are one of the first to leave. This is the first one I've seen since August.
• They are so strong. They fly around looking to eat, and then they throw their wings back and flap slow and hard and they hover in one place before the dive. It looks fucking dope.

• The WINGSPAN on these guys. Looks like he got his fish.

• I became friends with a person online over a decade ago, and when I got into birds it emerged that he had always been into birds. He and I finally met in person, after years and years of jokes and stories and the odd Christmas card, and we met in Maryland a couple of springs ago to go birding. We talked about people we knew in common in early days of twitter, about the bad times in early COVID, a little bit about our lives, and a lot about birds, birds we have seen, birds we'd love to see, best and biggest finds, favorites. When I said, “Have you ever seen an osprey fish?” he absolutely lit up; it is his favorite bird, it was his late mother’s favorite bird, if he ever got a tattoo it would be an osprey hovering. We both might as well have been wearing “ASK ME ABOUT OSPREYS” t-shirts, so excited were we to talk about ospreys we have seen and where we have seen them and why they are such fucking awesome birds.
• I should move more of my online friends into people with whom I can share experiences like that. I was obsessed with ospreys from the first time I saw one hovering, and now loving them is also tied up with the experience of loving friends, and loving connection, and loving to remember people and moments of import.
• Even without that cherry on top, though, look how rad this bird is! He wedged his fish in the crack in this snag and three crows were very interested in it, but he'd just lift his massive head and look at them and they'd fly a ways off.

• Okay, that's what I was waiting for, for it to bring the fish over to this side of the pond. Amazing bird. Glad they're back.

• Oh damn. Look at the owl. She has her whole tail and wings wrapped around her. This has turned out to be a great day at the swamp.

• Ohhhh, there's a handsome mallard on the way out. On any other day, it would have been you!

• I want to put music on in the car instead of my audiobook. It really is about to be spring.

BOTD: the osprey. I don't know what I can tell you that I didn't cover in my own thoughts. That really is what happens, when you have a view of one fishing, your brain just empties of everything but LOOK at those WINGS. They dive so fast and from so high, the exact opposite dive of the kingfishers the other day, it seems like it should not be possible to watch them come up with a fish. In a hundred years I'll never get the splashdown on film, not because of my poor photography, but because I'm usually just standing there with my mouth hanging open.