January 21, 2026

Where: my parking lot

When: 8:12am

Bird Species: house sparrow, Cooper's hawk

Things I Thought About:

• Cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold.
• Also, I am late, late, late, late, LATE. There better be a bird around here.
• There are not any birds around here. 
• Maybe they are too cold. I looked it up last night, and birds definitely do feel the cold. When you see them standing on one leg, it’s to conserve heat somehow. They don’t get frostbite, because there is almost no fluid in their feet. This was a disgusting fact to learn! I just want to look at them; I don’t want to know about their dry, sinewy little feet. 
• Unless they are ducks, when ALL I want to know about is their cute little feet on the ice. My brain is a land of contrasts. 
• It would be pretty embarrassing if someone jumped in my car and drove off with it right now. I left the engine running, to defrost and warm up while I try to find one goddamn bird to take a photo of, and I’d hate to have to explain it to State Farm.
• I wonder sometimes if I don’t worry as much as I should about crime, generally. At our COA annual meeting, my downstairs neighbor brought up the increase in crime, and everyone enthusiastically agreed. This seemed to boil down to someone rifled through someone’s car one night, but they might have left it unlocked. Also, there have been teenagers smoking weed in the parking lot at one in the morning. I’m not ready to form a Neighborhood Watch about it.
• There’s a house sparrow, but I just did one yesterday. The weather app says highs in the 20s all next week, so it might be house sparrows every day, since I can usually see one from my balcony.
• When I bought a new television six years ago, my brother in law told me very seriously not to be seen taking the box to the dumpster because then people would know I had a new television and might want to steal it. These were the kind of tips and tricks they taught us in high school health class in the 80s, to protect ourselves from crime. Similarly, we must always remember to yell FIRE! instead of HELP! when being murdered in our apartments. 
• What a depressing thought, that your neighbor would help you put out a fire, but not fight off an attacker.
• Okay, so there’s a hawk up there, and the only reason I can see him, I bet, is because it’s so cold. As I learned last night, they fluff up as big as they can in the chill, too. I will feature this photo so people can appreciate the scale but also walk down to the end of the lot, residential car thieves be damned, and try to get a decent shot.

• I wouldn’t leave my car running like this and wander off to look at a bird in, say, the Home Depot parking lot. I feel like this is fine. 

BOTD: Cooper's hawk. I've seen them a bunch lately, and now consider them a neighborhood regular, but this is the first morning I've seen him in a tree on our property. I think on a warmer day you would note that he is much leaner than this. I have seen one circling over the high school two mornings lately. Maybe there are field mice on the football field.

There is something of a push in modern ornithology to stop naming birds after people, which is probably wise, as anyone can get cancelled at any moment, but if this wasn't named the Cooper's hawk I never would have looked it up and found out it was named by Napoleon's nephew, Charles Lucien Bonaparte.