Way back when I restarted this blog shortly after I moved back to Southeast Asia, I made myself a promise that I was going to actually keep it up, and that I would post all my birding outings without skipping around too much or omitting major trips. Three years later and that's mostly been the case–I've gotten stupidly delayed at times and (more often) gotten way more detailed than necessary, but I managed a pretty good streak of making a new post every time I did a noteworthy trip. Now that it's March 2025 and it's been more than 6 months since the last time I posted, does that mean that I've left out a bunch of noteworthy birding?
Well, no, sadly. The reason I haven't posted in 6 months is that I haven't really done much birding over the past 6 months. As much as I hate to admit it, the last half of 2024 and most of 2025 so far have been a long period of birding drought, and my birding has declined to a fraction of what it was in the first half of last year. My excuses? Well, for one thing, DC in the fall and winter is... not really the most inspiring place to be for a birder, especially considering that up until recently I was regularly traveling to the tropics and had ample excuses to go off and explore little-known spots and look for unique birds. I haven't been able to do any work-related travel since I was in Malaysia and Indonesia last June, and a long-awaited trip I was expecting to do to Fiji this month suddenly fell through for (stupid) project-related reasons. I also don't have Nikki as an excuse to be back in Asia, since she's finally made her way over here to DC (not that I'm complaining of course).
Another excuse is that in October we finally took the plunge and decided to get a dog! The adjustment process hasn't been without its wrinkles, but on the bright side we have an extremely cute and loving presence in our apartment all the time. It's a net good (occasional chewed-up shoes aside), but having Rio at home makes it much harder to just drop everything and go birding somewhere outside the state.
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| The culprit, completely unaware of what he's done |
On a more existential level, the vibe in DC over the past few months has been... not great. While the results of the election weren't exactly shocking, even as a highly accomplished pessimist I was unprepared for just how quickly the erosion of norms and institutions has been since January. Tens of thousands of civil servants are being fired, entire departments are being (illegally) demolished, and the richest man in the world and his army of teenage minions are barging into government offices and taking a sledgehammer to complex systems in search of imaginary fraud. Instead of cutting fraud we're cutting medical research, disaster preparedness, pandemic response, and, uh, fraud prevention. People taking part in the program that helped launch my career are being stranded overseas or abducted on the street for exercising their first amendment rights. Abroad, we're treating our closest allies like enemies, cozying up to dictators, bringing back 19-century imperialism, and doing our best to wreck the global economy through tariffs. All of this, of course, is being done in the stupidest possible ways. It would be funny if I wasn't in the middle of it; the guy elected to fix the economy, support businesses, restore our international image, and Make America healthy again is now doing his best to drive up inflation, screw over businesses, alienate the world, and make everyone much sicker.
This isn't my first time living through a terrible election result or democratic backsliding. The difference this time is that I'm affected much more personally, and not just because I've given up any hope of getting Social Security payments or because my bank details and social security number are probably now on the personal hard drive of a 17-year-old named HitlerFan420 who's a senior policy advisor at the DOGE. I happen to have the misfortune of working in the international development industry, which means that all of this directly affects me, my family, and my general livelihood. That means that I get a first-hand view of the destruction of an organization that saves 3 million lives per year and its consequences. So far I still have my job, although my employment is not secure and is directly threatened by the sudden collapse of funds for international development. That's still more than I can say for many people, including friends who are being let go from their job and treated as enemies by their own government. It's also more than I can say for Nikki, who woke up one morning in February to find herself out of a job after the US Government decided to cancel the contract for the project she was working on without warning or justification. Meanwhile we're nervous to travel abroad with legal immigrants and Green Card holders having their visas revoked for arbitrary reasons, and it seems like the career we've dedicated our lives to is becoming inviable as we rush headlong toward a smaller, poorer, meaner world.
Anyway, I don't want to turn this blog post into an enormous political rant and I don't expect to change any minds with it either (in all honesty, if the above all sounds great to you then I don't really know what to tell you). All of this is to say that with all of the preoccupations about the future of the world, my country, and my career the motivation to get out and go birding–let alone blog about it–is at a bit of a low. It's not that I've stopped birding–my eBird streak is currently sitting somewhere around 1,350 straight days of checklists after all. Unfortunately, my 2-year-long trend of regular, major birding trips filled with lifers, rare birds, and good pictures has pretty much fallen off a cliff since August of last year, and is only recently starting to pick up again.
Late summer after getting back from Arizona was mostly spent inside waiting for the end of the stupidly hot and humid weather, with only a couple birding outings. We did have a nice morning at Kenilworth Park in DC with George and Atima, which mostly brought us the usual summer residents like Great Blue Heron, Belted Kingfisher, Acadian Flycatcher, and Indigo Bunting, along with some nice bugs.
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| Great Blue Heron |
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| Belted Kingfisher |
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| Indigo Bunting |
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Eastern Tailed-Blue | | Grey Squirrel |
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| Broadleaf Arrowhead (Sagittaria latifolia) |
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| Blue Dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis) |
In early September we did a quick weekend trip up to visit my parents in Michigan, where I did a little birding along the trail near my house and caught up with the usual common local birds and insects.
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| Rose-breasted Grosbeak |
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| Black-capped Chickadee |
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| Red-eyed Vireo |
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| Merlin |
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| Partridge Planthopper (Scolops sulcipes) |
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| Some sort of meadowhawk (Sympetrum sp.) |
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| Familiar Bluet (Enallagma civile) |
I was shamefully out of sorts for most of fall migration, and only got out for a few proper birding outings. A fun, low-key morning at Rock Creek Park in September with Vikas, George, Atima, Cassie and Will got a few migrating warblers like Magnolia Warbler and Blackburnian Warbler, along with a nicely sassy Brown Thrasher and a rare look at one of the small number of resident Northern Ravens.
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| Northern Cardinal |
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| Brown Thrasher |
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| Northern Raven |
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| Chickweed Geometer Moth (Haematopsis grataria) |
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| Gold-marked Thread-waisted Wasp (Eremnophila aureonotata) |
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| Hooded Grouse Locust (Paratettix cucullatus) |
At the end of September Nikki, Vikas and I did a mini-outing to Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge south of DC to try and catch some fall migration. There were a few decent birds, including a White-eyed Vireo and a surprise Barred Owl, but mostly we paid attention to the insects and other wildlife. The highlight was a baby Eastern Box Turtle we rescued off the road, and a Crossline Skipper that was a butterfly lifer for me. On the way back we stopped by the Tidal Basin for a rare-for-DC Grey Plover, one of just a handful of new DC birds for me last year.
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| Eastern Box Turtle |
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| Viceroy (Limenitis archippus) |
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| White-lip Globe Snail (Mesodon thyroidus) |
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| Arrowhead Orbweaver (Verrucosa arenata) |
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| Pearl Crescent (Phyciodes tharos) |
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| Eastern Pondhawk (Erythemis simplicicollis) |
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| Virginian Tiger Moth (Spilosoma virginica) |
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| Florida Predatory Stink Bug (Euthyrhynchus floridanus) |
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| Eastern Tailed-Blue (Cupido comyntas) |
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| Wild Indigo Duskywing (Erynnis baptisiae) |
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| Guinea Paper Wasp (Polistes exclamans) |
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| Gray Hairstreak (Strymon melinus) |
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| Agile Meadow Katydid |
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| Crossline Skipper (Polites origenes) |
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| Grey Plover |
October is peak fall migration in DC but a mix of business at work, worries about the future of the country (entirely well-placed, as it turns out), and a new dog meant that I barely got out birding. A quick visit to Kenilworth Park with Vikas did get a late-staying White-eyed Vireo however, giving the usual satisfaction of tripping the eBird rarity filter. Nikki and I also had a nice late afternoon stroll around the National Arboretum with Rio, although trying to manage an excited puppy with less-than-stellar leash skills meant that birding wasn't exactly top of mind.
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| Northern Cardinal |
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| Northern Mockingbird |
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| Ruby-crowned Kinglet |
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| Grey Catbird |
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| Common Checkered-Skipper (Burnsius communis) |
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| Variegated Fritillary (Euptoieta claudia) |
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| Lupine Bug (Megalotomus quinquespinosus) |
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| The culprit, once again |
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| How easy is it to get a 7-month-old puppy to pose for the camera? Not very, as it turns out. |
One big surprise was the November appearance of a Green-tailed Towhee in the National Botanic Gardens of downtown DC. It was the first DC record, and a pretty mind-boggling one at that considering that they are supposed to be several thousand miles away in the Rocky Mountains. Bizarrely enough this was my second Green-tailed Towhee of the year, the first of which being the one I saw in Mexico in March–that one being the second state record for that part of the country. The DC bird happened to be conveniently located on the way to my office, so I swung by before work and got to enjoy it scratching around on the ground just a few feet away from me and the rest of the very pleased twitchers.
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| Green-tailed Towhee! An absolutely absurd bird to be hanging out in downtown DC within sight of the Capitol Building. |
Unfortunately that was just about the only good news that came out in November, and certainly the only one of the surprises that was good. I didn't get out for proper birding again for over a month, but finally forced myself to spend a morning birding at Huntley Meadows Park south of DC. It was a good reminder of all the things I love about birding, and exactly what I needed to jolt me out of the post-election funk. I complain about DC birding a lot but the long hiatus from birding made even the usual stuff remarkable: the stark, contrasty colors of drake Northern Pintails, a brilliantly-colored adult Red-shouldered Hawk, an endearingly clumsy Pileated Woodpecker, and a tiny, sassy Golden-crowned Kinglet. Even Canada Geese can be understatedly beautiful flying by against the ghostly grey winter trees.
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| Song Sparrow |
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| White-throated Sparrow |
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| Northern Pintail |
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| Canada Goose |
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| Red-shouldered Hawk |
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| Hermit Thrush |
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| Pileated Woodpecker |
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| Tufted Titmouse |
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| Golden-crowned Kinglet |
In the middle of December a small group of Short-eared Owls suddenly appeared on Hains Point and spent the next couple of weeks roosting in the cypress trees, giving unusually good views to a gaggle of birders. Nikki and I got out to see them soon after we showed up, giving me a much-wanted DC lifer and Nikki a full lifer.
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| Short-eared Owls |
On New Years' Day I decided to start 2025 with some proper birding, joining many other DC regulars on an unusually cold and snowy morning. There had been a number of rare birds reported in the last week of December, but alas the Glaucous Gull seen by the Potomac failed to appear, as did the Short-eared Owls who completely disappeared and haven't been seen since. A Peregrine Falcon harassing robins overhead and a Pied-billed Grebe hanging out in the channel by Hains Point were probably my best New Years birds, although I also had to finish up early after I realized I was also starting 2025 with a bad sinus infection.
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| Peregrine Falcon |
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| Pied-billed Grebe |
An American Tree Sparrow showed up along the C&O Canal in mid-January and Nikki and I took an evening walk to look for it. It took some searching but we eventually managed to re-find it just before sunset as it hung out with the usual Song Sparrows and White-throated Sparrows.
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| White-throated Sparrow |
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| American Tree Sparrow |
In February we made a fun weekend trip down to Georgia with George and Atima, but that will have to be the subject of the next blog post.
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