April 22, 2026
Where: Wakefield Park
When: 6:20pm
Bird Species: American robin, northern cardinal, red-bellied woodpecker, blue-gray gnatcatcher, white-throated sparrow, house sparrow, house finch, osprey, house finch
Things I Thought About:
- I feel like I am coming down with something, and I am, as always, attacking it with complete denial.
- How does a subway work vehicle hit a subway train? Underground is another country. It's best not to think about it.
- Those cardinals are being very sweet.
- I'm not all that interested in photos this evening, to be honest. I'm very much enjoying all the song. Everybody is singing from deep in the obscuring foliage, loud and long and continuously. I don't really feel like tracking them all down, I'm just digging the soundtrack.
- You know how you can listen to an orchestra piece, and depending on your ear you can hear noise, or just the melody, or be able to pick out motifs, identify a few of the instruments. That's the level I'm at tonight, I can pick out the high pitch of a white-throated sparrow against the slightly lower-pitched but more fortissimo cardinal. But there's a lot going on in the piece I can't pick out at all, just part of the overall chorus.
- There are people who can listen to a symphony and hear every line and how they weave together. This is not part of a metaphor; it's just unbelievable that some people can do that.
- The percussion is a woodpecker who is drumming at the top of a tree somewhere. It's a different pitch but has the identical timbre of a Hanna-Barbera character getting ready to run away.
- Oh, all this time I've been grooving on the music I've been trying to place the hymn lyric "join the mighty chorus," which just now strikes me is in Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee, which is also Beethoven's ninth! It really is an symphony out here. What a nice walk.
BOTD: this particular osprey. He and his partner have taken up residence in Wakefield, for the third year.
All the length of this park are transmission towers. I have always loved transmission towers, how you can follow a clear line of sight out the car window when you drive by a long line of them on hilly terrain, and how cool they look, some square and solid and some look like you could push down their arms like a corkscrew. I just really like them; there's no explaining it. There are two in this park that I am very attached to; they are my two handsome sons, and they have names and a narrative and lore. Long time SKW followers on the socials will recognize them instantly.
So imagine my disbelief and pleasure when ospreys started building a nest on one a few years ago. (This is not my son, but they are cousins.) This nest held two nestlings in 2024, one last year, and a couple of weeks ago I saw they were back. At that time, one was on the nest and the other was out on the edge like this one is, but tonight I guess they're taking turns.
This is a very suburban park. It's hard to imagine they could find enough to eat in this stream, but I just really love it that they're here.
