July 15, 2026

Where: Cross County Trail at Americana Park

When: 6:25 pm

Bird Species: house sparrow, gray catbird, European starling, barn swallow, northern cardinal

(this feels weird for my dumb bird blog, but I'm a considerate person: CW sexual assault, in the general, not the specific)

Things I Thought About:

• Getting murdered. I feel like it's been a minute since getting murdered was so top of mind on a bird walk. This part of the CCT goes under 236/495 interchanges, so it's 3 bridge underpasses in a row. The combination of dark into light, and limited sight lines, and how there's only water on the other side so nowhere to run reminds me that I am woman who spends a lot of time on my own.
• Also, I don't know where my pepper spray is at the moment. I took it out of my bag to get on a flight a few weeks ago and I keep having to swap bags for one reason or another. It's somewhere in the house, but I am not in the house, I am under a bridge, trying not to get murdered while I look at some barn swallows and a catbird skimming the creek where he'll throw my body.

• When I was in middle school, we had a guest speaker, some variety of task force cop, I think, come in and talk to us about safety. There was a special session just for girls, exclusively about not getting raped. One hot tip was, if you have been kidnapped and hustled into a car and taken to a private place and you think he's going to rape you, try to piss or shit or puke on yourself so he won't want to.
• This was in school. An expert said this. A grown adult gave this advice in school.
• I said, in total bewilderment, what if that grosses him out, or makes him really mad? Won't he just kill me?
• My teacher, who, this is 1983, so I need not tell you was a baseball coach, told me to hush and listen and learn something, and later told me he thought I was disrespectful to ask that, since the speaker had a prepared lecture he was reading from.
• The guy fumbled through a "risk/reward" sort of answer, to use our judgment. The subtext, unspoken but extremely clear, was that a lady should actually prefer to be murdered to being raped.
• If you didn't live through it and could somehow get dropped into a sex ed class in the early 80s it would curl your fucking hair. You honestly wouldn't believe how these adults spoke to us, in school.

• Val Kilmer being hot and wearing eye makeup in every movie plus a full-on AIDS-epidemic panic curriculum; no wonder Gen X is so relentlessly weird and confused about sex.
• I never saw a television ad for PrEP in Georgia, and I didn't move from there until 2017.
• I wish I knew what kind of bird that was.

BOTD: a juvenile European starling, as it turned out. Man, I spent a long time on that bird. I could not figure out what it was. Like I have said, this is the season for fledgling and juvenile birds, and I could not for the life of me guess about this bird.

It was hanging out in a tree above the stream with a couple of barn swallows, so I wondered for a bit if it was a northern rough-winged swallow, but the tail didn't look long enough. It also looks a bit like a phoebe or a pewee, some kind of flycatcher, that would also make sense. The fact that it was soaking wet didn't help at all.

Then he finally gave me his back, and I could see that intricate pattern, and thought, "Oh, is it a starling?" and it turned out it is, now that I've downloaded all the photos. This is probably the least arresting version of their absolutely stunning pattern, but it is definitely a juvenile European starling. It looks just like the Merlin photo for that.

He is definitely the bird of the day, because he really made me work for the identification.