February 3, 2026

Where: the neighborhood

When: 9:45am

Bird Species: house sparrow, house finch, American robin, American crow, northern mockingbird, mourning dove, Carolina chickadee, northern cardinal, red-bellied woodpecker, Carolina wren, Canada goose (flyover), white-breasted nuthatch, fish crow, European starling, cedar waxwing (!!), blue jay, downy woodpecker

Things I Thought About:

• The havoc I have wreaked in my Jeopardy! group chat by confidently stating “Everyone my age knows Bolero because of Torvill and Dean.” This is controversial. People simply do not agree with this. People my age do not remember Torvill and Dean, have never heard of Torvill and Dean, say mad things like “And I’m supposed to know who wrote Bolero because of British ice skaters???” When I correct this with a gentle “British ice dancers” I am showered with insulting GIFs, and someone who is not my age points out that they were born 17 years after the Sarajevo Olympics. These are the kind of online pile-ons that make the internet untenable, imho.
• Oh, Canada geese! I hope that means the streams and ponds around here are starting to break up and move better. My heart pines for mallards.
• Yesterday’s slight thaw has refrozen, of course. Today my practice of experiencing the feeling of my two feet on the ground is less an exercise in consciously stilling my body so I can find the wee chickadees buzzing in yon tree, and more consciously stilling my body so my feet don’t slide out from under me and I snap my coccyx clean off.
• Wow, I think I have seen all the birds I ever see around here. A full house, a star-studded cast.
• I haven’t seen that Cooper’s hawk since the snow, though. I have always thought that raptors eat well in the snow, because they can see little animals better on all that white? Probably picked that up from Disney. 
• Oh nooooooo. I had a robin framed up and went to make an adjustment and found that I have somehow fat-fingered (fat-gloved) the knob and the aperture is dialed allllllllll the way open. I wonder how many of the pics I've taken will be worthless.

• I forgot the public schools had a delayed start today, so I am now sharing the narrow roads and messy sidewalks with a bunch of fully loaded students walking up to the high school. One thing that would not improve my attempts to navigate the treacherous patches nimbly would be a saxophone case.
• Oh, my gosh. Oh, my GOODNESS. I have never seen a waxwing here! I think I've only ever seen one three times before! And never this low.
• It's a miracle I noticed the camera was fucked before I saw these two. I would have wept. Everything's coming up Sara Kate.

BOTD: Cedar waxwing. A big deal for me! They are that rare bird that lives around here year-round, and yet I never see or hear them. It's a wonderful surprise to see one in my own backyard. They stayed high up eating berries in the treetops when I've seen them before, and I couldn't have dreamed of getting this nice a photo of a waxwing. I was scared to edit it at all, lest I ruin that odd soft glow they have. Impossible to capture, impossible to describe.

They really are an aptly named bird. Supposedly it's for the spot of shiny red, like sealing wax, on the wing tips, which you can't see here, but that warm yellow and white really does look like it has been smoothed down with wax. The color and buffed kind of smoothness remind me of a stick of unsalted butter that has been set out to soften, but they made the right choice going with waxwing. You couldn't name a bird butterwing.

"Sure, the black mask is hot, but he's a real butterwing."

Forget I said that.