Saturday morning was calm and chilly with an intermittent frozen precipitation of sleet and snow. There was also a noticeable uptick in bird song, despite the weather. Song sparrows, house finches, and Northern cardinals are making their presence known and it is comforting to know longer days and winter weather will soon be behind us.
I opted to start the day at Kenilworth, and once again the gate to Deane Ave was closed and the park totally empty. I parked on a neighborhood street and walked in, coming up empty on a hoped-for killdeer at the running track. I didn’t detect any Savannah sparrows either, but there were a few groups of the usual winter residents—white throated sparrows, tufted titmice, downy woodpeckers, ruby-crowned kinglets, a white-breasted nuthatch. Things did seem a bit slow, though, and I learned why as I spotted a perched red-shouldered hawk keeping an eye on things from just inside the forest edge. The hawk moved to one of the goal posts, and the field was quiet.
As I walked the western side of Kenilworth Park near the river, I heard one of the resident belted kingfishers, spotted a pair of female/immature common mergansers, and—most surprising of all—a pair of ring-necked ducks along the river. In the moment, I thought these may have been my first-ever ring-necked ducks for Kenilworth; however, a peek back through eBird showed this is not the case—I observed three ring-necked ducks here on March 6, 2021, and a single bird on November 20th of that same year.
A purple finch calling overhead marked my other notable observation, and I was considering walking my usual loop around the river trail to the gardens when an alert came in about a common goldeneye at Buzzard Point. Though not necessarily rare, common goldeneye are uncommon in DC, and there seem to be a few spots where they can be found, but not reliably. I’d recently dipped on common goldeneye from Gravelly Point, but this observation seemed an easier follow up as it is on the way toward home (and Hains Point), so I made a go of it and found the male bird near the marina associating loosely with some bufflehead. This was a very satisfying new year bird after my recent miss, so thanks to Bart H. for the report!
Since it was still relatively early, I decided to loop around to Hains Point to see if it was open as I’d heard it would be reopening at some point during the day. Hains had been closed ever since the tragic air crash at DCA on January 29th. When I arrived, the Hains was open to pedestrians but not cars, so I walked the loop. With no scope today and the dreary weather, I hoped anything on the water would be close enough in to observe through binos only, and this proved to be the case. Most notably, there were two horned grebes close in—one on the channel side near the point, and the other (with visible molt) on the river side. That was another first-of-year bird for me, and I later had amazingly close views of one of the resident merlin. While there was no sign of the celebrity yellow-throated warbler, there were several small groups of lesser scaup scattered about, and all-in-all it was a very pleasant 3+ mile walk on an otherwise dreary morning.
