February 14, 2026

Where: the neighborhood

When: 2:30 pm

Bird Species: mourning dove, blue jay, American robin, European starling, house sparrow, turkey vulture (flyover), yellow-bellied sapsucker, red-bellied woodpecker, Northern mockingbird, Cooper's hawk, cedar waxwing, song sparrow, white throated sparrow, house finch, dark-eyed junco, house finch, downy woodpecker

Things I Thought About:

• Obviously trying to keep a running journal of what’s on my mind on a daily bird walk is completely untenable. It takes me completely out, and the entire point of the avocation is that the thoughts come to you and you just push them out of the way so you can see the woodpecker behind them. Plus, it is a fucking mess in there. I will have to experiment a little over the next few days and come up with a better organizing principle. Surely my subscribers, 30% of which have some sort of newsletter themselves, will not be so gauche as to mention it took me 45 entries to realize my format was foundationally flawed. Doubtless one of them will let me know when I hit upon the right recipe.
• This platform doesn’t really support bullet points, either, so I’ve been assigning myself extra effort for a completely optional, purely aesthetic choice, and that’s my hair stylist’s job. I will subtly start making format changes now. Seamless.

So How Was Today’s Bird Walk?

Gorgeous, sunny and 55 (praise hands). People are out in shorts and t-shirts, and not just the men, who were also out in shorts and t-shirts when it was 38. It would have been better if I hadn’t noticed that my camera was set on Portrait Mode the whole time, which is suboptimal for subjects 65 feet overhead. Most of them simply didn't come out, but you should know that Cooper's hawk is back. We are so back.

This weekend is the Great Backyard Bird Count, where every February you can help ornithologists develop insights into global bird populations before they all get on the move in their spring migration (the birds, not the ornithologists.) I keep a list every time I go out, but I don’t keep a count, and it’s illuminating to do so. With all this melting snow saturating the ground, there were foraging flocks everywhere. I think I saw 100 American robins today. The massive presence of mourning doves is not, as I might have implied, a supernatural psychopomp omen of other worlds, but a sign of a thriving breeding population, which is something a bird scientist might want to know.

I was going to try to do something cute for Valentine’s Day and post some of the married couples around here, and I was thwarted at every turn, and almost none of the pics today turned out at all. Anyway, a strong marriage among blue jays is mostly manifested by the lady following him around 20 feet behind, and I will not support this tradwife ethos on my bird blog. Ducks are goals, though.

BOTD: house finch, but that's not important right now. Sorry, little dude, you're very pretty but definitely second choice. I wanted the yellow-bellied sapsucker to be the bird of the day, but his photos didn't take. I wanted him as an example of where the Bird Count this weekend really matters. Right now, YBSS has two completely different migratory ranges, and that's still holding up, but there are birds that used to meet that criteria that are now year-round birds in a lot of places, mostly due to diminished resources from climate change. Black bears don’t hibernate in the state of Florida anymore, either, and given the way the current administration is prosecuting its War on Data it's going to be the wildlife biologists that have the reach for widespread data collection and meaningful pattern analysis. If you see even one bird this weekend, you can play!

You've already seen my list, but here is my count I submitted. I feel wealthy.