March 4, 2026

Where: the neighborhood

When: 8:30am

Bird Species: American robin, house sparrow, downy woodpecker, northern mockingbird, European starling, common grackle, blue jay, northern cardinal, mourning dove, red-bellied woodpecker

Things I Thought About:

• 44 degrees but 71% humidity is the devil’s weather. How is my hairline sweaty.
• We almost tanked that game last night because we missed that Robert Redford movie. I kept thinking Legal Eagles, which was Debra Winger, and One Fine Day, which was George Clooney, but simply could not pull a 90s film with Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer together. I had a very hard time pulling a Robert Redford newer than Sneakers, actually. That is a bummer. I know he’s made like 20 movies since then.
• Sneakers is so, so much fun.
• Dustin Hoffman is sexier than Robert Redford in All the President’s Men.
• There are blue jays everywhere this morning, I think I’ve seen five. 
• The trees are really starting to bud. I love it, I love this blue sky, too. Foliage is going to make photos tougher, but a small price to pay. Excited for the time change, too.
• I wonder how many Ring cameras I’m on. Quite a few, I bet. Suburban homeowners with no fear of the surveillance state get to watch me step right up to the very edge of their lawn because I saw a cardinal couple in their bush once. 
• The starlings are starting to lose their winter white tips. None of them look really polka-dotted anymore.
• Have I seen any Robert Redford movies since Sneakers? Beside MCU, I mean. I fell asleep during a movie where Robert Redford was on a boat, and I watched about 20 minutes of a movie where Jennifer Lopez was his son’s girlfriend, I think. That is depressing.
• Ohhhhh, you suck, you little jerk. I spent all morning trying to take a photo of one of the blue jays, they’re all bad, and now I’m in my car, looking at the tree not twenty feet from my balcony, and there’s a goddamn blue jay in it. If I get my camera out of the case and try to quietly get out of the car, it will surely fly away.

• The other night a Cooper’s hawk landed in that tree, when I was in my apartment, but the camera card was in the computer, put it in and remembered the battery was in the charger, and by the time I got it all assembled, he flew off the second I opened the patio door. Comedy of errors. Maddening.
• I wish it was easier to see The Hot Rock. I had it on a VHS I taped off the TV in the 90s and if I’d known they’d never stream it I’d still have a VCR.

BOTD: the common grackle. I like this bird a lot! I thought for most of the walk that the blue jays were going to be the bird of the day, and he did take the nicest picture, but this grackle was perched up so nicely, in the half hour of the day where there was actual sunlight. I loved the picture when I downloaded it. It's so saturated with color, with the buds and the sky and his own colors; I didn't make any edits at all. It looks a little unreal.

There are several reasons to like this bird. I love all iridescent birds, and the grackle coloring is so consistent. I took another photo where you can see more of the variation in his body, but that one up top shows off his incredible profile. Their heads are amazing, with that glowing, shimmering green and his bright yellow eye. That long, slightly downcurved, heavy bill is so striking; it couldn't be one bit longer without throwing all the proportions off.

It's the eye, though. He just doesn't look like any other bird.

I feel like "A Bright Yellow Eye" would be a fantastic name for a short story about a woman who poisons her father, if I had written it in 1915.