February 10, 2026

Where: the neighborhood

When: 2:30 pm

Bird Species: mourning dove, house sparrow, European starling, yellow-rumped warbler, northern mockingbird, northern cardinal, white-throated sparrow. American robin, house finch

Things I Thought About:

• One of the worst relationship dynamics any woman could ever have, and one of the worst professional partnership dynamics any woman could ever have, combined and manifested as an extremely dubious French ice dancing team, dutifully framed in live coverage as “overcoming adversity.”
• Also thinking of Mike Tyson, convicted rapist, delivering his “obesity is disgusting, also, poor people” message to the largest sports audience of the year, as if one could possibly think anything other than oh nooooo mike tyson thinks i’m too gross to rape
• People are going to think I don’t like sports! But ice dancing has come up twice in a week on a blog about birds, so that case is dismissed, I think. I am just feeling irritated by people who can do feats of physical strength and grace and prowess better than 98% of the world’s population and being dogshit humans otherwise.

• I have noticed a certain degree of unconscious curation creeping into my approach to the BOTD, six weeks into it. As I walked out of the house, I was considering what I wanted to feature, I don’t want to do another sparrow or junco, maybe a male finch, is it too early for a jay again, mockingbird is probably due up. This is very wrong, I think! The bird of the day nominates itself, and it's not always, or even usually, the best bird photo of the day. I’m trying to empty my mind and get back to, for want of a better term, winging it.
• When I list some of the Things I Thought About, I am never making it up, and you wouldn't believe some of the miserable and/or stupid shit I think about and don’t tell you. I keep the bird list in chronological order of me seeing them, which helps remind me where I was in physical and mental space at the time. You will note how the entries are usually top-loaded with what I’m mad about, or what I’m listening to or what I just watched, or the email I just read, and then slowly get taken over by descriptions of the weather, and my physical body, and the birds and how the arc of the days is changing with the month, and I can just hope I can adequately convey the comedy and contentment and calm of spending ten minutes trying and failing to find a singing wren.

• I saw a huge mess of starlings around a short tree snag and snapped a photo right before they all took off in a cloud right in front and then over me, and it was so noisy and unexpected that I shot both arms straight up in the air overhead and turned to watch them go, right in front of the school bus dropping off cool tweens. Good thing I’m invisible to them. I damn near whooped.
• I can feel dampness in the hollow of my throat because after two weeks of sub twenty-degree temperature the sweatshirt under the hoodie today was really overkill. Glorious.

BOTD: Northern cardinal, female, failing to find her light. Nevertheless, she was a treat to watch for a few minutes. There were starlings roiling all over the trees right next to her, and her husband was bickering with a robin, and she simply could not care. There was a male house finch snacking on the same stuff, but I liked her better.