May 15, 2026
Where: Lake Accotink Marina
When: 5:30 pm
Bird Species: American robin, house sparrow, downy woodpecker, European starling, song sparrow, blue-gray gnatcatcher, song sparrow, American goldfinch, Canada goose, double-crested cormorant, great crested flycatcher, barn swallow
Things I Thought About:
- [some extremely redacted shit about The State of Things]
- How does anyone in Washington DC fuck. Every man is married, and awful.
- [Full House theme song] everywhere ♫ you look ♫ there's a fucking squirrel ♫
- A couple with an adorable shrieking child in a stroller pass me. The father says soothingly, "You don't cry, and you don't get mad." Objectively incorrect. The child is doing both.
- Aww, our little fuzzy buddies are getting some color on them. Still very cute. Not for too much longer, though.
- Earlier this evening my sister said the word "doughnut" to me and that's going to be a huge problem.
- I can't see too many birds, but there is a real orchestra tonight. The gnatcatchers sound like a piece of classical music with a lot of gravitas, but played on kazoo. The cardinal's alto "whhheep wheeep wheeep" is soaring over all of it, and mourning doves, who have the most versatile instrument, are taking both the liquid whistling descant and the bass line hoots.
- I think I forgot to even be looking for birds, I was listening so hard. It's nice to stand on a green trail after a day in a convention center with LinkedIn psychopaths.
- That is a very fat song sparrow. I love him.
- I wish those cormorants would land. Another Shakespeare bird, the cormorant. Cormorant devouring time. He used them as a metaphor for greed and gluttony and as a portent for evil, but maybe that was the great cormorant. The double-crested ones always look vacant and happy to me.
- Well, that's not a goldfinch. I...do not know what bird that is.
- There was a doughnut truck at the farmer's market last Saturday. Fingers crossed for tomorrow.
BOTD: it turned out to be a great crested flycatcher, but that's almost irrelevant.
What happened was, I was completely zoning out, not even really looking for birds, and I saw this one fly in, with a feather in its mouth. It was at the very top of the tree, almost directly overhead, and from the ground, I had no idea what kind of bird it was. I knew it wasn't the goldfinches I'd been seeing in the treetops before then, because the tail looked completely different, and I didn't think it was a cedar waxwing, because it wasn't glowing the way they do. I just decided to take a few pictures and keep watching.
His silhouette kept changing, with that feather balanced in his mouth, his outline made all kinds of shapes. I was pretty sure it was a great crested by the time he flew off, but this is the first time that the Bird of the Day revealed itself to me without my having an ID on him. His changing silhouette was just so mesmerizing seen from the ground that I knew whatever he turned out to be, he was BOTD.
When I downloaded and gave just a little light on one of the photos, it was easy to confirm the ID. Those wing bars are the clue, although he does have a crest that you can't see here. If I ever get a better photo of one, I'll show you. A great crested flycatcher has a pale yellow under belly that is super pretty.
