October 12, 2026

Where: the neighborhood

When: 11:00 am

Bird Species: house sparrow, northern mockingbird, white-breasted nuthatch, red-bellied woodpecker, northern cardinal, blue jay, downy woodpecker, Carolina wren

Things I Thought About:

• What a pretty day to be off work. I’m a little sad that I can’t make it out to Huntley today, but it just hasn’t timed out right with other plans today. That’ll be my weekend for sure.
• The last time I was at HomeGoods, there was a seasonal snack on the weird snack aisle that was candy corn and pretzels in a milk chocolate and caramel bark. I left it in the car to melt, and have not been able to find it again since. There was a similar candy today, but it also had candy eyeballs and sprinkles in it, and somehow that was a bridge too far. Like somehow the innate elegance of a candy corn and pretzel bark had become compromised.
• Boy, catching a bird with a snack in his craw is always a treat. It simply never gets old. Those lovely lavender and pale blue porcelain berries are starting to pop out across the road and mockers and catbirds love them. I'll be keeping a close watch.

• The trees in my own complex have the most species I've seen today. I have to remember to pop back to the property line on the back side of the complex, not just the creekside. There are two wrens, two jays, two nuthatches, two cardinals in the trees tucked in the corner in the last courtyard. Cuffing season. The cardinals are both male, but love is love.

• For lunch today I had something called tallarin saltado peruano, which is a Peruvian take on chow mein noodles. It was odd, but good. I understand a slang term for it is aeropuerto, airport, which I both do and don't get.
• I had turned on Merlin at the start of this walk, I can't remember why, and I am immensely gratified to note that I saw or at least heard every bird that popped today. Every now and then I'm quite struck by the fact that this is something at which I am genuinely becoming proficient. This is nothing to sneeze at. I think the last time I got interested in something brand new and eventually became really good at it was in college, and that was just making homemade bongs.
• All kids my niece's age wear over-the-head earphones. I mentioned it to her, that I wondered about their hearing, and she very seriously told me that my earbuds are actually much worse for hearing damage. Then she showed me her phone screen and I decided I simply do not have the standing to engage on any topic even tangentially related to technology with her. Gen Alpha has defeated me.

BOTD: downy woodpecker. I had to do a little chase to get this photo today. I heard him first and had to track it down among a few trees by the sound, and as I did so, I was suddenly struck by the very vivid memory of the occasion where I first listed this bird, back in November 2023.

This was well before I had any skill at all for identifying birds by sound, or even by sight for quite a lot of them. I just checked my life list, and a downy was the seventh bird I ever listed. The only songs I was reliably identifying at that time were the Carolina wren, which as I've told you many times was the reason I ever downloaded Merlin to begin with, and the white-throated sparrow, which quickly became my favorite sound.

So I was pretty proud of myself that day when I heard the call, said "I think that's a woodpecker!" and opened the app to find I was right. Ridiculous, as we now understand woodpeckers to have some of the loudest and most distinctive calls out there. Once you recognize one woodpecker, you cannot mistake them for anything else, and now I can distinguish all seven species that you see around here.

Uncommonly, when I said, "I think that's a woodpecker!" I was not talking to myself, but to the aforementioned niece, who was at the time 10 years old and still happy to accompany me for a walk outside. We had gotten on the Cross County Trail at Eakin Park, the bluebird baseball field park, and had made it about halfway down to the first crossing when we heard it, and she got excited because I got excited.

I described the photo, not too big or small, only black and white, with maybe a little blaze of red on the head if it was a boy, and the two of us tracked it down, little series of quick steps, stop, hear the call again, run to catch up, three or four times, and then we both saw it at the same time, and we whooped and spun in a little circle and high-fived.

She never really fell in with birding with me as I've gotten into it, and I'd be pretty surprised if she remembered this occasion at all, but what a lovely thing to be reminded of today, as we enter the same time of year, with the same haunts and hangouts, experiencing the same little chase to catch the same little bird, now a familiar neighbor that makes me happy at just the sound of his voice.