February 2, 2026

Where: the neighborhood, plus a few more streets than usual

When: 2:30 pm - 4:52 pm. Don't tell anybody.

Bird Species: house sparrow, blue jay, American robin, downy woodpecker, northern mockingbird, northern cardinal, white-breasted nuthatch, European starling, mourning dove, house finch, white-throated sparrow

Things I Thought About:

• I am so happy to be outside. Very recently I would have thought it was cold out, but I am only wearing two shirts under my coat today. It is a balmy 33 degrees and brilliant sun and blue skies. I am never going back.
• I caught up on the news last night, doing some of the endless scrolling and clicking that I resolved not to do in bed at night, and at the start of my workday I felt very unrested and fully insane. All I plan to think about are these birds, and how bright all the colors are, and how nice it is to get out of my head, and my own complex, and out onto the roads.
• Wow. There are a lot of birds around today. I guess they are finding some soft spots too.
• Not matching outfits, but coordinating outfits.

• I surely am getting a double calorie burn, toting around these heavy snow boots. I’m glad I wore them in all this slush, but I am ready to unzip my coat. A perfect winter afternoon, except for how disgusting some of these side roads are, where they didn’t plow, only sanded.
• That white-throated sparrow has eaten like six berries in a row.
• I feel like I will never be able to take the photo I want to of a winter starling. Between them staying up so high, and how particular their plumage is, I just can't get the shot that will show what I want to show people about them. Either I can't get the way the winter white tips make them look polka dotted, or I miss the disco ball iridescence in the low sun, and when I somehow manage to catch a little bit of both I can't focus because they are a hundred feet straight up and fully obstructed with branches. I think I will allow this to become an obsession, where I take 100 mediocre photos of starlings for every one decent photo of a different bird.

• Not that I don't already have a current obsession. The female cardinals all had a meeting and decided to defy me. This is genuinely the least obstructive view I could get from the sidewalk, around all the still snowbound cars and three-foot-tall snow berms. Tell me she didn't do this on purpose.

• The male of the other cardinal couple has really interesting coloring, basically a rose on the back and wings, getting very light pink on the bottom. I'm sure any photo won't do justice to his coloring, but I love this pose, like he's on the steps at the Met Gala, looking back as he shows off his fabulous cape. He knows he looks great.

• The birds are really good today. I think I got great shots of the downy and the mourning doves, too. Great bird break.
• I feel like I will have really turned a corner when I can see a duck.

BOTD: the white-breasted nuthatch. You know how in a dog show, the winner is not the best-looking dog, but the dog that is most like that breed of dog? That's how the nuthatch won today. There were more colorful birds today, and birds I stopped and watched carry on for longer (namely the cardinals, who were on a merry chase with another couple behind them) but this little guy was acting exactly like a white-breasted nuthatch.

He was making his little laughing noises, he was upside down, he was running along the underside of limbs, he was wedging seeds in crevices to pop them open, he was hopping around until he had covered every branch, and when he was ready to leave the tree, he led headfirst. A textbook white-breasted nuthatch.