August 22, 2026

Where: Wakefield Park

When: 11:35 am

Bird Species: chipping sparrow, house finch, mourning dove, northern cardinal, northern cardinal, European starling, eastern bluebird

Things I Thought About:

• Okay, well, what you need to know about today's bird walk is that I was crying for most of it. No big deal. We're all doing great!
• The top four reasons I cry, in order, are Something Happened in the Thing I'm Reading/Watching, Someone Hurt My Feelings, I Hurt My Own Feelings, and Money, and I have hit for the cycle in the last 36 hours.
• Can I tell you, something, though? The bird walk helped. Despite my noticeable decline and the audit trail that is this blog, it always does.
• ANYWAY, I decided to walk up to the highway to look at the transmission towers, lined up in their rows. I am obsessed with these, both as individuals, and with the look of a series of them disappearing over a horizon. Loved them as a kid, love them now. And at this park, you will recall, ospreys nest on top of one.

• So looking at these for a while is very soothing to me, so much so that I fail to notice that I accidentally fat-finger the camera dial to an aperture setting that I do not want. It's cloudy enough that they aren't completely unusable, but the photos for the rest of this walk will be slightly overexposed.
• A warbler! I cannot identify it (possible a redstart), and I didn't catch it on camera, but it was unmistakably some sort of warbler. I love fall migration, when you have approximately .4 seconds to get a shot of a small olive bird with yellow accents before they all fly 1500 miles further south.
• This park has new fields with new fences, and the birds love them. They're everywhere, perched on the edge, and nestled in the links. I wonder when fall league play starts.
• School starts here Monday. I imagine the traffic is about to become dreadful in the mornings.
• And of course, when fall games are playing, the starlings won't be able to gather in huge numbers on the field like this and then take off in a big undulating murmuration.

• I feel like about five hundred more starlings in this murmuration would fix me.
• I feel like a little neck rub and $85,000 would really fix me.

BOTD: Eastern bluebird. I always see them at Eakin Park, sitting on the outfield fence, and today there were several sitting on this outfield fence. I don't think we should conclude "bluebirds like outfield fences" as much as "bluebirds like sitting up somewhere with a clean line of sight, maybe." None of these look as pretty as they ought to; the camera setting washed out the blue, especially on these immature birds.

I was pretty happy to spot this one in the tree nearby. He looks a little older, though by no means a mature male. Certainly his plumage was the most vibrant pop of color (the fractional second of bright yellow warbler excepted) I saw today. His photo came out better, largely because he was in the shade, so my aperture priority was less extreme.