May 3, 2026

Where: Huntley Meadows Hike & Bike Trail

When: 8:42 am

Bird Species: northern cardinal, northern mockingbird, American redstart, indigo bunting, blue grosbeak, eastern bluebird, barn swallow, great blue heron, great egret, green heron, white-eyed vireo, ruby-throated hummingbird, red-winged blackbird, blue-gray gnatcatcher, common grackle, Carolina wren, eastern towhee

Things I Thought About:

• It is Wetlands Awareness Day, and Huntley has timed entry today for some special events. I love this but wish I had known about before I drove out here.
• I guess I’ll do the Hike & Bike trail. Every time I have posted about Huntley I have been on the side of the park with the wetland and boardwalk, but there is a sprawling amount of acreage on the other side of the ponds that is mostly field and forest.
• It is a much longer walk to the water views on this side than on the other, and its paved asphalt on the straight path, and I am feeling it in my hips today. I have days where I feel like I'm one stretch away from feeling 28 again, like I could bend over and drop in just the right way that my body would unwind like a slinky and settle back into perfect, pain-free order. Today is not one of those days.
• I simply must start doing my PT exercises again.
• Right away I see an indigo bunting, an immensely frustrating bird. Their shade of blue can sometimes look very powdery, like the tempera paints from elementary school, but it is a structural color, meaning that when they are not in full sunlight they just look like a dull blob of a bird. Today I see a brilliant splash of blue, but a million miles away.

• A lot of birds that I don’t see all that often over here today. My first hummingbird of the season, too. Amazing how they are so tiny but always set themselves perfectly to be seen.

• When I first started with birds, I thought warblers would have beautiful songs, but they don’t sound like that at all. They make little…sprays…of sounds. I'm hearing several this morning.
• Picture the sound a warbler makes as like a handful of bright sprinkles, maybe animated like Tinkerbell. Each warbler has a different sound, based on how high you throw up your handful of sprinkles, the speed and duration at which they then fall, how bright they are, how slow they fade. A common yellowthroat's sparkles dance around on the same level, only two or three tones, and fall very quickly, only a note or two, and then gone. A prothonotary warbler's sprinkles are much higher and much brighter, and they don't fade at all, they just go out.
• Can I recognize a warbler by their warbling? Absolutely not. There is no scenario where I can hear a warbler and know what kind of warbler it is with nothing else to go on, but I can tell the sounds from each other, which is more than I could do at the beginning of last year's season. That's how I find the American redstart, because his little spray of sound has a precipitous fall to a single note that none of the others have.
• Photos of warblers are close to hopeless, though. It's a feature, not a bug; warbler behavior is to always just have been at the last place you look. I downloaded the photos and I have four blurry pictures of the underside of a redstart.
• I think it is safe to say that my apartment is as trashed as it has been since I bought it three and half years ago, but I bet I don't do anything about it today.
• I should have taken a week off between my last job and this one.
• There was a literal tunnel between our hotel and the venue, and again between the venue and the labs, and I feel like I literally didn't see the sun for a week. It’s sunny and 44 degrees and very windy, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

• When you get up and it's very chilly and then it finally gets warm enough in the sun that you can take your sweatshirt off and tie it around your waist, so you're warm in the sun and still a little chilly in the shade? 10/10 physical sensation. That's how you know you're alive in your body.

BOTD: the blue grosbeak. I have never before gotten a decent photo of one and almost didn't today. It is stocky summer songbird, and not especially hard to see, but for whatever reason I've just always missed the shot. They have a very deep blue color and pretty chestnut wing bars, a very striking bird.

On this meadow side of the park there are a bunch of bird boxes set out in all the fields. I had been looking at a male eastern bluebird guarding one of the, when this blue bird streaks past me and buries itself in the thick foliage on the other side of the trail. It was very obviously a much deeper blue than the bluebird, so I start looking around a bit, with no expectation whatsoever I will actually see this bird, between its speed and all the leaf cover and how unlikely they are to stay low in the trees. I'm just idly looking around, and I see this:

So I can tell in a moment that this is a blue grosbeak, there is no other candidate for that deep, deep blue, but it is hopelessly obscured. You can't tell from this photo, but there is like a fifteen-foot depth of tree branches between me and this bird, and I am looking at its back.

I circle around a bit, and have to move about 10 more feet further away to get a bead on his whole body, and he's just completely covered back there, and then do you know what? That wind comes up again, in big gusts, and it just blows the branches that are obscuring him out of the way again and again. I wait there, looking at where I know he is, waiting for the greenery to part, and snap photos every time I think he's clear, in the hopes of getting a nice shot. And I get some. The one up top was the best, the wind blew both the branch in front of him out of the way and the branch he was on into the sun.

This goes on for about six full minutes, which is longer than you think. Between the wind, which I love, and how he is completely unbothered by getting blown around like he's on a swing, and how the branches between us keep hiding him and revealing him, and that deep, deep blue, I felt like something special was being shown just to me, almost like a magic trick. Now you see him, now you don't.

It was a very lovely moment. Despite my aches and mental fatigue, it made me feel calm in my brain and my body again. I'm glad to be home.