February 25, 2026

Where: the neighborhood

When: 9:30am

Bird Species: house sparrow, house finch, song sparrow, American crow, northern cardinal, northern mockingbird, mourning dove, American robin. The usual suspects.

Things I Thought About:

• In this audiobook a man is teaching a woman how to drive a manual transmission, and I am struck by the vivid memory of simply climbing out the driver side of a Volkswagen Sportruck without pulling over on HWY 255 in North Georgia because I was done with how a man was talking to me. This was, I believe, 1990, and I was not yet 20 years old, and I did not stand up for myself like that again for the next 18 years or so. 
• I believe I am now too old to be taught how to drive a manual transmission. I am also too old for a man to stand very close behind me and show me how to shoot a flaming arrow through a hoop to claim a throne, and it’s about as likely that I will be offered that learning opportunity as the driving one.
• This book is pretty bad.
• There is a married couple of house finches buried deep in this bush, thwarting my auto-focus settings, but I do want to try to show the back of the male house finch. They've been BOTD before, but I don't think I've used a photo where you can see that the vivid red-orange colors go all the way down his back.

• I'm sorry to have to say this, but between the bad light and the weeks of terrible weather, the time of year with shedding plumage and juveniles losing their pinfeathers, all that time when the water was frozen and now the standing muddy puddles, on the whole, the birds are looking pretty busted this week.
• Except for this beauty, which is by far the best photo I got today but she can't be bird of the day because she thinks she's better than me, even though she has food on her mouth.

• In the novel I write a man would stand very close behind a woman and just give her a little neck rub. She already knows how to shoot pool and a rifle.
• If you went into labor and the only car around was a manual transmission, we should probably wait for a ride, but if you were bleeding from a chainsaw wound, I could for sure get you to the hospital in it. Turns out, it's mostly vibes.

BOTD: Song sparrow. I was actually kind of looking for a white-throated sparrow, and you may see one tomorrow if I can find one. They are winter birds and every day I don't see one I worry that they've moved on.

There are an astonishing number of types of sparrows, most of which are simply impossible to distinguish from each other unless you see a bunch of them. You can see a field sparrow in a swamp, and swamp sparrow in a tree, and a tree sparrow in a field. Most of them are noisy, most of them are streaky, and there are almost 40 species in North America.

I can always recognize a white-throated sparrow, a song sparrow, and a house sparrow, but I usually have to download photos and really labor over them to ID any others. My life list is white-throat, swamp, song, house, field, fox, and chipping. Only one of them, the field sparrow, do I clearly remember saying at the time, "Well, wait, that one is different!"