October 25, 2026

Where: Huntley Meadows Park

When: 6:56 am

Bird Species: eastern bluebird, northern cardinal, white-throated sparrow, song sparrow, house finch, red-headed woodpecker, northern flicker, Carolina chickadee, tufted titmouse, swamp sparrow, red-winged blackbird, American crow, eastern towhee, red-bellied woodpecker, great blue heron, ruby-crowned kinglet, eastern phoebe, green-winged teal, ring-billed gull, greater yellowlegs, great egret, great blue heron, kildeer, blue jay, brown thrasher, hermit thrush, mallard, downy woodpecker

Things I Thought About:

• I am so sick of it being pitch dark when I leave the house. The time change is next weekend, and it is going to fuck me up indefinitely, but I will be happy about that part. 
• Not that Huntley isn't already doing a pretty brisk business this morning. The river otters have been out and playing at sunrise this week; there have been half a dozen cute photos in the various FB groups. I am confident that there are already 15 photogs on the back pond. 

• Some variety of nut or fruit falls next to me with a thud, and I jump a foot. 
• Things are starting to wake up. I see a juvenile red-headed woodpecker, his head still very brown, and a fun little handful of eastern bluebirds poking around the same hollow tree. There is a green tree frog of all things, clinging across two flat blades of swamp grass. It is shocking to see him. It is not quite 40 degrees:  I can see my breath. 

• At one time I frequented a coffee house that shared a gravel driveway with a popular fine dining restaurant and wedding venue. One Saturday I sat there drinking coffee and chain-smoking and watched a woman in a pastel suit and heels get out of her car and pull out a very tall stack of wedding gifts from the backseat, moving gingerly in her heels on the gravel. A gentleman on our porch stood up to go help, and in that moment a giant green walnut, still it it’s heavy outer hull, dropped from a tree a hit her square on the top of the head. It must have hurt like a sonuvabitch. We all just watched in silence as she shied violently, almost dropped the packages, rebalanced the stack, rebalanced herself, and walked into the guest house without any assistance at all. She never made a sound. It is honestly one of the most impressive physical performances I have ever seen. I think about it often. 

• Speaking of unseasonal visitors, there are still some greater yellowlegs around. I would have expected them to be gone by now.

• There is a dad on the boardwalk who is pointing out birds to his child, and he keeps pronouncing "mallard" and "mal-LARD." People are visibly flinching. I am imagining someone tipping their fedora to a pair of ducks, "MalLard, MalLady."
• A fair number of small groups of a Sunday morning are very obviously post-church walks around the park, and you can catch threads of conversation about gratitude and the power of nature to restore. As always, it is very easy for me to shift into Swamp Church mode in my brain, my exclusive brand of Personal Pan Pantheism, and some of the banger hits from the Chalice Hymnal.
• Autumn hymns I like are in short supply. You'd think Thanksgiving would come hard, but it does not. I do not like We Gather Together, which is only an autumn song by tradition. Come, We Thankful People is legitimately a harvest song, but it is about corn. I do not consider corn to be especially inspirational.

• I do not like Simple Gifts. It is a tune for babies. The lyrics people set to them, including the original Shaker version but most especially The Lord of the Dance, are atrocious.
• To maybe three people, that will be the single most incendiary thing I have ever posted. I stand by it.
• On the other end of "dance" related sacred music, there is an absolutely gorgeous choral anthem called And the Father Will Dance which is very much more my vibe. Not particularly autumnal, but nevertheless there are mood changes, key changes, eerie thrumming minor key harmonies. There is a moment in the final verses where the melody soars up and over the edge of a flat to explode into a major key on the lyric "Put on a garment of praise/as on a festival day" that makes me feel some kind of way about being a creature alive on this beautiful earth, under a gaudy blue October sky, watching my breath paint itself in swirls on the cool air, and do it again, and again, and again.

BOTD: the brown thrasher. I have listed this bird, having seen it cross the road in front of me at Blackwater, or light for a moment and fly away again along the CCT, but I have never really observed a brown thrasher in habitat, to see its behavior before. I have now observed its behavior, and I am here to tell you it is an absolute maniac.

Incredibly, I was observing this bird from the observation deck, so a lot of the time it was below me, and I am here to tell you that whoever named this thing a "thrasher" was dead on the money. Watching this bird forage by dragging his bill violently across the earth, through puddles, throwing up huge chunks of dirt and leaves and debris, my first thought was "Tasmanian devil." Then he started charging around, down to the water, up to a stump, into a bush again, with such speed and sharp-angle turns, I thought "road runner, meep meep." A looney tune regardless.

He's kind of a large bird, not nearly as big as a duck but much larger than a cardinal or robin. That tail fan out to a truly massive, sweeping fan that adds a lot to the general air of chaos it brings with it. I fell pretty hard for this bird today. What a treat, having checked him off on my list just on first sight, to discover a whole new wild and abandoned personality I had never seen before.

Also, not for nothing, an incredible brilliant yellow eye. A very good bird.