April 7, 2026

Where: Ranger Road Park

When: 5:42pm

Bird Species: eastern bluebird, white-throated sparrow, American robin, northern cardinal, mourning dove, downy woodpecker, white-breasted nuthatch

Things I Thought About:

• The Mothman Prophecies must have just dropped onto streaming somewhere. Both of my horror movie podcasts have covered it this week.
• It is...so, so stupid that according to lore the Mothman has a first and last name. What if the Loveland Frog had a full name. What if the guy from Jeepers Creepers was named Bert Franklin.
• The Mothman is the dumbest cryptid. West Virginia also has the Flatwoods Monster, which has the absolute coolest artists' renderings, despite probably being a barn owl.
• The problem usually with returning to a park where you had a good first bird outing is that it often disappoints on the second visit, but not this evening. Lovely birds, and a lot of them. The bluebirds are here again. Not the pileated woodpeckers, though.
• These are all the same birds I see in my neighborhood, except the bluebirds, but they all seem...faster here? Is that a thing? That the birds can have a different sort of personality, park to park? These are all very energetic and quick, in constant motion, even the ones that are ordinarily placid like the mourning doves. They seem much more excitable than my backyard birds.
• Maybe they're all just horny. Maybe there's cocaine in the water. Maybe the Malibu Realtor's association just had their company retreat here.
• West Virginia also has that headless monster, which is a very funny cryptid. Wild that the Mothman is the one that hit for them.
• Richard Gere is good in the movie, though. He's good in Chicago, too.

BOTD: the eastern bluebird. The females, like that one, are such a nice soft blue. I like how the warm orange-brown color shows so pretty on the edges of their wings in all that blue. I wish the photos had come out a little better. They looked so blue in flight, but in the few moments I found them in the tree they were not in the best angle or light to see that.

And some bluebirds really are bluer than others. They grow a new plumage every year, and the newer feathers are brighter. Something fun: bluebirds are bluer in rainy years, when there are more insects and berries, which increases the quality of their diet during the molt.

On top of that, it's a structural color, so the light has a lot to do with it. Not too much to be done about the sun at this time of evening, but believe me when I say there were much, much bluer in person.