January 30, 2026

Where: around the complex

When: 10:20-10:55 am

Bird Species: European starling, house sparrow, northern cardinal, downy woodpecker, blue jay, Carolina chickadee, white-breasted nuthatch, dark-eyed junco

Things I Thought About:

• Birds. Snow. The weather. My camera. I truly can’t remember thinking about anything except what I was doing, my daily outside time, which is important to me. Is there something about treacherous icy conditions, sub-freezing temperatures, and sub-standard winter gear that can really keep a person present, in the moment? Who can say. Perhaps the Donner Party.
• A notice has gone up on the bulletin boards forbidding residents to feed birds on their balconies, and especially to not put out bread for them, which I would not do in a thousand years. Bread is bad for birds (especially ducks, fyi) and also, when I was renting on the ground floor here, I killed 11 field mice in my apartment in two weeks once. You cannot give mice an inch in this kind of cold.
• Oh. I bet that’s what that story book is about.
• There's a nuthatch, making that funny little angle I mentioned when they were BOTD, when I was forced to feature him with a much, much worse photo. I love them when they bend like that.

• It is 15 degrees. I have on fingerless gloves over regular gloves, two pairs of socks stuck in my boots, and maybe nine shirts. A balaclava. There will be no fiddling with dials and knobs today. Auto-settings or nothing, and quickly.
• Boy, it’s pretty out. The sky is very blue.
• Cold though.
• There are children in the other courtyard throwing snowballs at each other and then dodging them like they’re in The Matrix, for good reason. A snowball fight with this would feel exactly like a billiard ball fight.
• Okay, I am sure I have at least a couple of bird pics that will be good enough to feature. I am excited to pop the lens cap back on and bury my hands in my coat pockets. 
• Don't want to go in yet, though. It's amazing how instantly more comfortable I am, when I consciously relieve myself of having a task.
• I keep startling myself, thinking I see birds moving around really close, but what I am actually seeing is the wind pushing at one of my many hoods. 

• I have had that experience for real, though, two or three times, in fact. In the early morning sun, and in a very narrow slice of real estate, a bend in a trail, a place where the brush is tall on both sides of a road, and suddenly there is movement everywhere, and much closer than is common, especially for me, a person who does not go off trail. Rustling at ground-level in the heavy brush, songbirds trying to find the tops of bushes, short flights tree to tree, low and quick, and their voices waking up too. The first time it happened was maybe two months into my birding pursuits, and my body experienced it as overwhelming, genuinely alarming, so many birds, is there supposed to be that many birds, where do I look, where do I point my camera, what kind of bird was that, slow down, hold still so I can see who you are. It can't have lasted more than 35 seconds, but that was long enough for anxiety to rise up in a wave, I’m missing the shot, I'm missing somebody, I’m missing it. I only knew about 15 birds at that time.
• Last October I was checking out a park I had heard about in Maryland, a former municipal golf course that the city has let nature reclaim, so the paths are paved cart paths, but the rough has absolutely consumed what was formerly the back nine. Like every golf course, there is an insane part where one hole is like 40 feet lower elevation than the previous one and around a curve and you cannot imagine how people didn’t flip their golf carts on the descent every day. The same thing happened: early morning but the sun fully up, a narrow little squeeze at the lowest bend in the path, and suddenly birds all around, and close, just every type of sparrow flying back and forth across the path, almost eye level, robins, a married cardinal couple, maybe a hermit thrush. This time I didn’t try to take photos, I didn’t try to list all the birds, I just watched in stillness for a half a minute, and then it was over. All I felt was happiness, and like I had somehow been favored, and how I can’t wait for it to happen again.
• Okay, well, I am on the record, canonically, as a Squirrel Disliker, but you can’t say that one in the back isn't working for it.

BOTD: The Carolina chickadee. They have a buzzy little call, and a pretty little song, and are on the whole a nifty little bird. At a marsh they like to pick at the big cattails.

There is another species called the black-capped chickadee, which is confusing. They both have black caps.