September 5, 2026

Where: Lake Accotink Marina

When: 12:25 pm

Bird Species: fish crow, Canada goose, double-crested cormorant, green heron, osprey, hairy woodpecker, American robin

Things I Thought About:

• I do not want to walk today. This is clean the house day at Case de Sara Kate, and I have done exactly nothing. It is humid as all hell, too.
• I had intended simply to walk outside and take a photo of the first bird I saw, but I decided to pick up a couple of groceries and the upper marina parking lot is on the way, so I stopped, forgetting that it is the Saturday of a holiday weekend. This place is packed. The rental place is only open on the weekends, and it is doing a business. This is a very small lake, and I can see seven rental canoes on it. There's a huge party with live music in one of the pavilions. The singer is pretty bad, but it's also kind of nice.
• No ducks yet, and not a lot of small birds, either. Probably hiding from all the noise.
• There is a jogger, drenched in sweat, panting, leaning against a tree, clearly recovering and resting, looking at some open app on his phone. As I walk past, I can clearly hear that he is watching an electric wiring tutorial? "This is a 1/8th cable, so you want to try for 125,000 amperage..." trails behind me.
• Imagine going for a run in the 90% humidity, stopping, and immediately studying to rewire your shed or fix a speaker or some fucking thing. Men are the wildest.

BOTD: green heron. I did so great today. It has been a slow couple of weeks for birds, and today was all about the hunt, not the shot. I do most of my birding by ear, at least to start, and there was much too much foot traffic and canoe traffic to dial in on a sound. This was a real rarity for me, where this bird did not make a sound, and did not make it easy, and I won through ingenuity and patience.

I saw this bird fly in from a very far distance (both he flew a far distance, fully across the lake, and also I was a far distance away.) All I had to work with was "he's somewhere on the right side of the lake." I get on that trail, which is high above the water, scouring the shoreline, and the first time I spotted him, he was just a blob of a reflection in the water that didn't look like part of the tree. So I scan up, and find him, and look at this little jerk.

So there he is, fully visible to kayakers, while I'm bent over and twisted all around on a crumbling hillside trail, and I can't see for shit. He's on the shore close to the first bridge, and about fifty yards back there's a little spit that runs out into the water, to make kind of right angle. I backtrack to see if I can get a view from him from that angle, and I can, but it's an impossible shot. Too far away, and dark, and there is just enough dangling foliage to thwart an auto-focus.

So I backtrack again, on the other side of the angle again, and I find one spot where I can see him just a little better, but not by much, and I am holding a full squat, so making adjustments is not something that is easy to manage.

Finally, he makes one little hop to the next tree, blessedly branchless, and I find a little gap in the woods where I can see him. It is the tiniest window of opportunity, and I get off one entire shot before he flies back to that brushy tree and is gone from sight again.

A lesser woman, which I definitely am on weekdays, would have simply cursed and given up, but I was already in a full-body slime sweat, and I was feeling good about how many full squats and crouches I was managing and how long I could hold them, and I just kind of had a good feeling that if I was patient, he would come back. I move further up the trail, where there is an actual step-down trail with railroad ties to a view on the water that included this leafless tree, and I just sit down and wait. He's either going to come back, or he isn't, and in the meantime I can faintly hear the music, and there is an osprey flying around overhead, and the wind off the lake is drying off the sweat on my neck and face, and then the heron does come back.

I felt good about all of this. Terrific bird. Unlike great blue herons, these guys will leave by the end of October, usually, so it felt good to get a couple of really nice photos before he's gone until April.