Saturday, January 4, 2025

In the current issue of Living Bird, author Ed Yong describes his love of birds and compares birding and social media consumption as two different ways to spend your time. In the past, he says, “I spent a lot of my time and my life on social media, caring about what people who I don’t actually care about are saying and thinking…” Now he spends that energy on studying birds, such as trying to discern between a western or a semipalmated sandpiper probing the sand. He says, “And one of those things is a total waste of my time, and it’s desperately uncool. And it is not the sandpiper thing.”

The only social media that I consumed was Twitter, until that went south, then I switched to Blue Sky. There are a few people that I like to follow there, but the rest seem to have devolved into the usual shouting and quick takes. I’m reading more books and essays by writers that I follow, and of course, studying our yard birds daily.

Even before first light, the early birds have arrived at the feeders: cardinals and juncos. The rest move in as the morning progresses. Today, the regulars were joined by a single tree sparrow. A female yellow-bellied sapsucker stopped at the crabapple (which is ringed with sapsucker holes). Her head feathers looked a bit ragged, perhaps molting, but her features were clear: red cap, white throat, faint yellow belly. Sapsuckers do indeed consume more than sap, as she was pecking and eating pieces of a shriveled crabapple.

21. Tree sparrow
22. Yellow-bellied sapsucker