July 1, 2026

Rabbit Rabbit

Where: Hidden Oaks Nature Center

When: 4:45 pm

Bird Species: white-breasted nuthatch, tufted titmouse, eastern towhee, northern cardinal, mourning dove, blue jay, downy woodpecker, house sparrow, American crow, pileated woodpecker, Carolina chickadee, house finch

Things I Thought About:

• I am going to take off some weight and part of that is getting my routines back in order, so I think the morning walk simply has to be a morning walk, that I take every day, for the purposes of starting the day on a physical, virtuous path. I will take the camera, but this can't be a bird walk, it has to just be a walk. This morning I took the loop at a moderate pace and did not let myself get distracted, and it is shocking how easy it wasn't.
• You can get 10K steps a day as a birder, easy, but if your pulse never cracks 90, you have to train up again, I think.
• I have kept up the blog every day for the whole six months? I bet I could sustain a new routine.
• Meanwhile, at 4:45 pm, I am entirely alone at the nature center. Probably because most sensible people looked at the temperature and decided to stay home.
• And is this one of the nearest, largest little flocks of titmice I have ever seen? Yes, it is, because titmouse was BOTD yesterday. We all know this. Wash your car and it rains.

• I meet a dog at the frog pond. Her person says she always wants to say hello to the frogs, but I would think she'd want to eat the frogs.

• I wish I wanted to get a dog. It would be the easiest way to win my niece's love.
• Sometimes when I get a good look at a mourning dove's feet, it really brings home that they are basically the same bird as the urban pigeon. Some bird groups call rock pigeons "rock doves," but it is not going to catch on.

• It is possible I have already mentioned the rock dove thing on the blog. Who can even remember.
• I think I should get a trainer. Every strength training workout for women my age online is the same, and bad for my knees, and I think the act of paying a human money to tell me what to do will help me with compliance. Doing things that people on the internet tell you do isn't at all the same.
• Example, a person on the internet said that Cherry Almond body lotion repels mosquitos, and I absolutely believed it, and it is simply not true at all.
• Then again, you also cannot believe what people tell you in real life. An actual real life dentist told me that it is no longer best practice to give kids braces, that it turns out to be bad for you down the road, and it's simply cosmetic and therefore unethical to do for the sake of it, and he never recommends braces and the whole practice of orthodontics is headed in this direction. I believed this, I even told someone else this. Then I got interested and looked it up and it turns out that this is some big tenet of MGTOW, how fixing teeth gives the handsome alpha men an advantage, etc. Either incel shit, or straight up eugenics shit. An actual practicing dentist told me this, and I believed it, because he was a dentist.
• You cannot believe anything from any source. These are bad times!

• Also, it isn't going to help. Timothy Olyphant has a fucked-up grill and we'd still all bang him like a busted screen door.
• The nature center is closed so the big window by the bird boxes is a mirror. I do that hot move fit athletes do when they use their shirt tail to wipe sweat off their faces, exposing their rock hard, shredded abs. I do it, and I look like a broken can of biscuits.
• Do people still get spray tans? I think it would help.
• I am lifting and pinching things, giving myself my profile, checking out the magnitude of the disaster that is my torso, when the lights come on inside, and it is no longer a mirror and I am no longer alone, but instead making this unflinching physical inventory in front of a volunteer, two moms, and two little kids who are setting up for a birthday party.

BOTD: Blue jay. It's been a minute! I was seeing them all the time for a while, but not so much. This one is married.

I always love to see the splash of blue these guys make. Winter, spring, summer or fall, they really pop against all backgrounds and in all light.

Hidden Oaks is only a seven minute drive. I'm always stopping on my way home, but I should go more often. I saw a lot of the birds that are around right now, and deer and chipmunks, too. I will go in disguise, now, I guess.