August 4, 2026

Where: Ranger Road Park

When: 5:40 pm

Bird Species: American robin, white-breasted nuthatch, northern cardinal, Carolina wren, American goldfinch. Heard but not seen: a bunch of assholes

Things I Thought About:

• I was thinking about my niece, who is a goblin, and rolled right into thinking about creepy. poems.
• We must not look at goblin men/we must not eat their fruit/who knows upon what soil they fed their hungry thirsty roots is incredible. What a line. 'Goblin Market' is a Victorian poem and it's about sex. It would be better if it was just about goblins.
• Another good spooky poem is Yesterday upon the stair/I met a man who wasn't there/he wasn't there again today/I wish I wish he'd go away. Banger.
• I would like to find the flicker that has been screaming at me and hiding from me since I got here.
• The most fun spooky poem is of course 'Little Orphant Annie', a poem designed to showcase dialect and onomatopoeia and to terrify small children.
• James Whitcomb Riley was the poet laureate of Indiana, birthplace of my late parents. One time as a child when I was being tucked in while our Uncle Bob visiting, I said I wished he would “come to our house to stay” and my dad picked up on that the line and started reciting this poem, and my mom JOINED him, and they just CHANTED this poem at us, from memory, while my sister and I goggled at them from our beds in shocked and horrified delight.
• Apparently, schoolchildren in Indiana learned this poem as part of Indiana history curriculum in the 1940s and ‘50s and it turned out all 14 of my parents‘ brothers and sisters and spouses could also recite most or all of this poem.
• The folksy Hoosier dialect is like nothing on this earth.
• I guess if I wrote a spooky poem, it would be about tracking a northern flicker through the woods until I was lost and dying and then finding him and punching him square in his pointy little pecker.

BOTD: Carolina wren, for showing up. Look at this:

Of this list, from the center of the park, guess how many of these birds I actually saw with my eyes. ONE.

I was on my way back to the car in a sour mood (blackly annoyed by a specific woodpecker is my least favorite emotion, I think) when I heard this wren singing, and I thought, "Fine, they are an easy one, I'll go see if I can find THIS bird and then I'm leaving," and is it turned out, I could.