September 1, 2026

Rabbit Rabbit

Where: Ranger Road Park

When: 5:38 pm

Bird Species: gray catbird, American goldfinch, mourning dove

Things I Thought About:

• I’m pretty over this park. It’s really my only option on Tuesdays, and I have fallen into the trap of thinking I should see good birds every time I come here just because I saw good birds the first time I came here. But the neighbors are not especially pleasant, and it's extremely buggy. All the good birds hang out by the stream, and that is also where the rotten teens from the high school hang out smoking weed and yelling each other. Most nights I will see a bird and fulfill my brief, but it's not a pleasant walk, usually.
• It doesn't help that it's like 96 thousand fucking degrees again.
• No birds. I saw a goldfinch for half a second, and there's a mourning dove on the powerline, but nobody interesting and nobody close.
• Today chugged nuts.

BOTD: Welp, no bird today. I was in a foul mood then and I'm in a foul mood now. I allowed myself to become totally distracted by this eastern black snake.

Often there will be a bird on or near this stump, but today there was this snake on the stump, and eventually inside it. I zoned completely out watching him sniff into every nook and cranny and then find an ingress and squeeze himself into it. Then I spent several minutes imagining someone sitting on the stump, or a bunch of kids playing hide and seek and making that stump home base, not knowing there's a big ass snake in it.

I only ever have around 20 minutes for outside time on Tuesdays. By the time he had vanished completely inside, and I was done fantasizing about children running away, shrieking, from a harmless eastern black snake like they were in a Little Rascals short, it was time to go.