October 8, 2026

Where: Eakin Park at Tobin Road

When: 5:50 pm

Bird Species: eastern bluebird, house sparrow, Carolina wren, yellow-rumped warbler, Cape May warbler

Things I Thought About:

• The sun is sinking behind the trees on one end of the park, bisecting the gold of the trees on the opposite side. You can follow it over the course of an hour as the line of darkness slowly climbs up and eats the fall colors. It is late, here at the shank of six p.m.

• Only late for photos, though. Not a bit too late for a nice hobble around the ballfields to capture the blue birds I didn't snap on Tuesday. There is a single specimen perched on the top of the foul pole on the field where there isn't a practice.

• My niece, who is a Cool Teen, and therefore very humbling to know, is a member of Gen Alpha, apparently. When she told me this I naturally told her not to even try to alpha me, which turns out to be slang she had never heard in her life. So I had to explain what that means, and me being me, I also had to explain how the theory of alphas in wolf packs had been pretty thoroughly debunked and now alpha-ing somebody is pretty much reserved for finance bros and paranormal romance novels. She could not possibly have cared less.
• All this over text, too, of which hers look like something you'd find scrawled on a notepad in an escape room. wyd kk nvm
• Hi, I'm Andy Rooney.
• I'm so Andy Rooney that I want to gripe about how some subscribers will need to google Andy Rooney now.
• Wolf packs aren't ruled by dominant alphas; they're ruled by strict dads.
• The little leaguers are gassing each other up, doing Seven Nation Army on a long O sound; with their prepubescent high voices they sound like a little pack of pirates. It's a nice soundtrack for a chill in the air, and the delicious melancholy that accompanies the sun going down on a beautiful October evening.

BOTD: I blogged about it yesterday, but it was Tuesday when I was here last and listed a Cape May warbler for the first time. I honestly had little expectation of seeing it again, but here is where I saw warblers, which I consistently miss in the fall, so I will be hanging out at Eakin for a while, I think. I certainly didn't imagine she'd be there in the same tree.

Would you believe that a person could watch the same bird for almost half an hour? Warblers are so tiny and so quick that it is very uncommon that I could even keep on in line of sight that long, never mind at a near enough distance to get a few photos. This one just really liked that tree. Merlin says they strongly prefer spruce, but there aren't any around here. There was a yellow-rumped warbler dancing around in there with her. Maybe they just like company.

You can see through the sequence that it really did become fully dark as I followed her from one side of the tree to the other (the cover photo was the last of the night, I was manually focusing because they're so quick and at that point it was so dark I couldn't tell if I was in focus or not.) The flash makes the photos look a little stark, but I loved seeing those little explosions of light and color and movement. Time well spent.