May 11, 2026

Where: the neighborhood route, plus diversion

When: 5:20 pm

Bird Species: song sparrow, house sparrow, red-bellied woodpecker, American crow, northern mockingbird, mourning dove, European starling, brown-headed cowbird, northern cardinal

Things I Thought About:

• The audiobook I am listening to is full of regency shenanigans, and I miss about a third of the ambience of this walk by not turning it off until I know whether the widowed Lady Sofia takes Lord Audley up his outrageous offer and whatnot.
• I am on a sidewalk. How are there gnats everywhere.
• Clouds of gnats around my head are not just annoying, they make me feel like I'm dirty somehow. Bugs flying around your hair is Pig Pen from Peanuts, and I do not care for it all. I must charge my neck fans.
• Because I was distracted by the machinations of Violet Worthington's scheming mother, I haven't taken a photo of a bird since my own complex. I decide to follow a cute little young, red-bellied woodpecker, and find myself at a very narrow paved path with an open gate and a sign, NO ENTRANCE DURING SCHOOL HOURS. It is 6:14 pm so I enter.
• This appears to be an alley that will let me cut behind the high school. There are big painted garage doors and obviously out-of-commission cars on blocks on the school side of the path, and a fence backing up a row of houses on the other. I am scanning all the backyards, looking for the woodpecker, and whispering "I do beg your pardon, but I am in your garden."

• I do beg your pardon, but we are in your garden is a classic chant that I say out loud often while birding in a neighborhood, and it gives me mad fits of the giggles every time I say it. One day I will be whispering it while staring at an owl in someone's yard at dusk, and I will hear another birder start chanting it from the other side of the yard, and we will meet in the middle and fall in love, before the homeowner calls the cops on us.
• This little path is obviously the yard area of what when I was in high school was called "Vo Ed:" the shop, the garages, Industrial Arts. It's only different from my high school in that there are no teens out here smoking cigarettes and getting fingered.
• It is Aggressive Mockingbirds Are Patrolling the Neighborhood season. I have not been doing my morning loop because I've been getting my steps in as part of my commute, but I think I will get back to it. Last year there was an amazing turf war between some crows and the mockingbirds on one street and I'm excited to watch two mockingbirds scare a crow under a car again.

• I never see Pinky around anymore. I hope that's because he got married. This is what usually happens when your friends get married.

BOTD: Song sparrow. Despite my woodpecker diversion, these were the birds that captured me today; I stopped and spent several minutes watching. There were two gamboling their way along a tree line early in my walk. They looked very small and possibly very young, and they were chasing each other, scampering after each other up a tree, flying to the overhead cable and then back into the green, popping out again, never letting the other get too far ahead or behind.

Intellectually, I'm sure that this is sex, that it was a male and female (they are visually almost indistinguishable), but watching them the prevailing energy was that of two young boys after school has let out, when they must walk home, but no one will really start looking for them until dinner time. It looked like play, taking the long way 'round, and it was nice to watch, especially since they were singing at each other the whole time, with those three sharp starting notes before the trilling song, one after the other. I didn't get a single shot of the two of them in frame together, because one was always running to catch up. A couple of good birds.

Today was a great example of how you don't pick it; the Bird of the Day reveals itself. I saw these guys within half a block of my front door and walked 80 more minutes after that. I got much better photos of the others mentioned here, and the woodpecker was an interesting break in the usual route, but when I got home and started composing today's entry, these two specific sparrows were the birds I was still thinking about. They had excellent, happy vibes.