September 4, 2026

Where: the neighborhood

When: 6:30 pm

Bird Species: gray catbird, American robin, chimney swift, fish crow, mourning dove

Things I Thought About:

• It just thunderstormed, and I have surely missed the light for the day, but TGIF am I right. It is still good to get a walk in after a long walk.
• When I have a chance to plant my feet on the ground and look at a bird being pretty and interesting, I can feel a couple of the strands that have me all tied up and cinched give way with a snip. I am pre-dreading the shorter days.
• Digital cameras do this thing when the light is poor where if you have any of the auto-settings on, the flash will flutter before you can take the shot to give you a light reading. This means that by the time you can actually take the shot, the bird is gone 88% of the time. If you do get the shot, the bird is overexposed. And if you're shooting into a tree on or near a homeowner's property, you look like a little Danny DeVito paparazzi perv.
• If you turn the auto-settings off, the flash won't fire at all, and if it's even a little dark the image is blurred. It's a very trying time of day.
• There is a bird called a chimney swift, that I hear often at sundown. When you hear this bird, the only place to look is straight up. I have known about this bird for four years, and I have never seen one still. I've never seen one that isn't in full flight. Cornell describes them as a bird "best identified by silhouette." There are dozen flying around tonight. They're a really interesting, industrialized bird, but I will get old and die without ever taking a photo of one.
• There is the first episode of the new series of Taskmaster waiting for me at home. And I heard today that season 2 of Ludwig will hit Britbox on October 13th. Everything's coming up SKW.
• Ludwig season 2 looks great. Sian Clifford will be in it. Mark Bonnar, who was so excellent and is just criminally uncelebrated for his role in Catastrophe, is in it. There's going to be a Christmas special! Snowed in at a house party with a corpse, with David Suchet guesting. I'm delighted with all of this. It's a very fun show.
• Get a 7-day trial subscription to Britbox and I will tell you what to watch.
• British shows are so fun because literally the biggest stars and best actors in the UK can crop up anywhere. They don't have the same obsession with "I'm a movie actor, not a television actor" that American actors had until very recently. Every British actor just works. This is what comes from robust public funding for the arts, no joke.

BOTD: the American robin, the only half decent photo I took tonight for the reasons described above. Here he is, looking like his ex-wife hired me to take this photo of him through a hotel window.

And here's what he looks like with the flash off. It would never hold up in divorce court.

Honestly, the bird of the day was probably the chimney swifts, but I can't really show them to you, so record this one in your spreadsheet with an asterisk.