July 18, 2026

Where: Hidden Oaks Nature Center

When: 7:10 pm

Bird Species: white-breasted nuthatch, northern cardinal, downy woodpecker, American crow, mourning dove, house sparrow, house finch

Things I Thought About:

• I have been so hot all day, and now it has thunderstormed, and the air quality and temperature are much, much better, but it's quite wet and quite dark. Once again, I suspect these photos will be worthless.
• I have a reader submission, a guest birder saved in the drafts, but I'm saving it for a day when I'm genuinely unwell or genuinely unable to go outside all day, and not simply feeling cranky and lazy.
• There is a very small boy at the frog pond. He points at the sign and confidently tells his grown up, "That means the frogs stink." Then he goes low into a crouch next to a frog who has hopped out of the pond and whispers, "Hello, stinky butthole."

• I am having one of those moments, like you sometimes experience driving, where you know you've taken this route a hundred times, but you look up and it seems completely unfamiliar. It feels even eerier and more vulnerable on foot than in a car. I think it's because we just got through a storm, some places where limbs were precarious are now all the way down, and some of the bushier bushes are sodden and closer to the ground.
• I simply cannot see. I mean, I can see, I've seen a nuthatch and grow and a cardinal and a finch and a downy, but they are absolutely nowhere in the camera viewfinder.
• Oh, a lightning bug! It's later than I thought it was. I feel like it's been quite a while, maybe all year, since I've seen a lighting bug.
• One summer in the 90s I was in the very deep woods in the north Georgia mountains living in a house with a bunch of other performers, and there was a man visiting from Australia. He was about to fall in love with and marry my friend and stay, but at that time, it was his first time in the USA. I was washing dishes when he came backing into the house through the porch doors like Chief Brody backing into the cabin on the Orca, slowly, and white as a sheet. He turns his head and says to me in a hoarse whisper, "Please come outside so I can show you something." They were lightning bugs.
• In north Georgia they fill up the woods in huge numbers, an immense swarm of blinking lights in every direction through the understory and trees. It absolutely looked like an invasion, fairies, or, as Derek confessed, a little sheepishly, maybe alien lights.
• They don't have them Australia. He had never seen them. He had no idea what he was seeing, and he was as enchanted as any adult ever could be by them. We all stayed out until they died completely away, and did it several more times that summer.
• I'll never forget it. It was the first time where it really struck me, the world is huge, and full of wonders and miracles, and what might be ordinary to me, a lightning bug, a giant weeping willow, a great blue heron, might be a shock and a delight and magical moment to someone else.
• I'd like to go to Africa, I think. I'd like to see a giraffe.

BOTD: Northern cardinal, I guess. The red was the only thing I could catch at all. I left it much too late today. I did try to experiment with low light settings, but they all looked like this:

Hopeless. I was nice to walk in the woods after a storm, though, with great cascades of rain still pouring off the trees and not too many people out with their dogs.

The bird of the day was frog and also chipmunk.