March 16, 2026

Where: around the complex

When: 12:20pm

Bird Species: Cooper's hawk, American robin, mourning dove, house sparrow, northern cardinal, northern mockingbird, house finch, northern flicker, blue jay

Things I Thought About:

• It has been one full week at my new job, and I am frustrated by the fact that I don’t know how to do everything yet. 
• Impostor syndrome has never been a problem of mine. Provided there are no complications, I am confident I could do an appendectomy after someone walked me through one first. 
• I could also totally land the plane if the tower talked me through it.
• Oh, it’s so spooky and windy out here. I love wind. I love huge gusts of wind, provided they are warm. There is nothing better than sitting on a big, covered porch waiting for a storm to roll in.
• I think the birds know we are under a tornado watch. They are very active, and some almost seem frantic. That mockingbird is eating faster than I’ve ever seen one eat before.
• House sparrows are a very ordinary bird but they do a very fun thing, where a bunch of them will just, like, hang out in a bush, and sit on top. Then if you get too close they'll sink back into the bush and then pop up somewhere else. It reminds me of prairie dogs. Or Whack-A-Mole, except with sparrows.

• Wind is very sexy. I feel like in another life I could have been one of those idiots who chains themselves to a sea wall during a hurricane, like Skink in the Hiaasen novels.
• “Another life” in this scenario being one in which I don’t especially mind whether I live or die, I mean. I was there for maybe seven months once, in 2012, but then my sister got pregnant with the niece and gave me a reason to take cover in a storm again.
• The terrible niece wants me to meet her on her field trip in DC Thursday and has no frame of reference for why “I’ll just run over on my lunch break and find you on a walking tour of ‘all the monuments’” isn’t going to work for me. 
• She got, correctly, extremely aggro with me Saturday when I told her “I do not think ‘Mall’ means what you think it means in this case.”
• Ha ha! See a northern flicker, post a northern flicker. Counting coup. I win this round.

• Michael B. Jordan and Jesse Plemmons were in a show together. I thought people were saying they were both from Texas, but only Jesse is.
• Game Night is such a fun movie. It's wild that Rachel McAdams can have been an American sweetheart for 20 years and still be underrated.

BOTD: Cooper's hawk. I saw this guy fly in from my window, and he reminded me I needed to get in a bird walk before the weather really rolled in, so I kind of owed him. Also, he looks so WILD. This was the only bird I saw the whole time that looked a little freaked out at the prospect of 55mph wind gusts. Look how fluffy.