July 24, 2026

Where: Braddock Elementary School parking lot, mostly

When: 6:30 pm

Bird Species: house sparrow, house finch, gray catbird, northern cardinal, mourning dove, northern mockingbird, European starling, song sparrow

Things I Thought About:

• It is incredibly nice out. I can't believe I spent all day working for a living, like a chump.
• I finished my Australia book. It was excellent. Jane Harper; I had read a few before. No desire to go live in the outback, I'll tell you that.
• There is a row of trees bordering the lot at the neighborhood elementary school, and I always see birds flying in and out but never investigate because it's an elementary school. But school is out and there isn't a car around, so I will walk the whole lot and see what's what over there.
• If you walk all the way up the ramp on the corner-most trailer, one of the 'mobile classrooms' that appeared at every elementary school in 1975 or so and never went away, you can see a row of wild black cherry trees. Chokecherry? I don't know the names of trees, but everyone in the southeast has seen one of these.
• Oh, I see. Every bird in the neighborhood hangs out here.

BOTD: The house finch, although there were also cardinals, mourning doves, mockingbirds, a ton of sparrows, and catbirds dining on these berries, too. I will confess, in a not especially common moment of abandon I ate a weed gummy at like 4:15 pm, so I mostly just stood and watched everybody eat. I didn't think about anything in particular, and I forgot I had my camera for a lot of the time, too.

To that subject, the blog has been bad lately! "Things I Thought About" as a key section was perhaps fraught with the potential for peril from conception. This week has been a string of days where either I have been thinking things I don't especially care to share, or days when I bust out of doors for a birdwalk because my brain is whirring and I can't make sense of my own thoughts enough to write notes. And today, of course, I didn't think about anything.

I am in a slump, which I fully expect to snap out of shortly because I always do, but in the meantime, remember to send those guest birder submissions along to skwbotd@gmail.com.