February 19, 2026

Where: the neighborhood

When: 9:12am

Bird Species: mourning dove, blue jay, northern cardinal, American robin, Carolina wren, European starling, house sparrow, house finch, common grackle

Things I Thought About:

• A bunch of personal shit I will doubtless tell you about another time.
• Today is sunless in a completely different and arguably worse way. Yesterday it was just dark, so at least some of the more colorful birds would pop, but today the sky is low, an obscuring layer of damp and haze, and when it momentarily brightens everything in the camera lens goes white rather than sharpening. 
• I honestly cannot imagine grabbing a single good photo of a bird today. The fog is leaching the color out of everything. The ordinarily clown-orange breasts on the robins are a dark muddy yellow, and you can barely tell the difference between a male and female cardinal through the gloom. It's wild how long you can look for a wren singing at the top of his lungs before finding him on a day like today.

• On days when there is a rosy sunset and an American robin is in a treetop catching it dead-on, sometimes that clown-orange breast glows a fiery hot pink. It is startling and remarkable.
• I am having to use my binoculars for every identification today, with only the silhouettes to go on. The only pop of color are three slowly deflating heart shaped balloons at the top of one of the tallest trees. There is certainly no reason to find this depressing.

• I wonder if the singer Screaming Jay Hawkins was thinking about blue jays when taking the name. There's one around here that is certainly screaming enough.

BOTD: the common grackle. That photo is edited to hell for brightness. Grackles are a dark, dark blue-black and iridescent, so there should have been a lot of green and bronze in his plumage, but all this guy had going for him is that he was close enough that I could focus, and that he has a pretty cool silhouette with that bright yellow eye (it's bright yellow, not that you can tell.)

The sun is supposed to come out tomorrow at 4:30 pm, so that will be nice.