It's October 1st and we are enjoying a wonderful prolonged summer. Only I know that it's really not summer. I'm a four seasons person—would not change that for anything—so when the warm, sunny weather leaves us I will move on to real autumn. Still, the fine weather is lovely and should be enjoyed.
I was recently walking around the neighborhood and reflecting on how I had actually spent my summer. It would be easy for me to say that I didn't do much. But that wouldn't be exactly correct.
When I returned from my Finland and Norway trip at the beginning of June, I spent basically the next four weeks writing about it on this blog. It was a great trip and writing about it, episode by episode, was such an enjoyable activity for me. Then writing about F/N, lead to writing about our brief and distant sighting of a Terek Sandpiper for 10,000 Birds titled: There's a Shorebird on the Roof.
The July ABA Magazine article titled Lost on the Frontier by Brad Meiklejohn led me to write: Missing the Gray-headed Chickadee.
Then I listened to Nate Swick's prologue on the ABA podcast about the new documentary film by Owen and Quentin Rieser titled Listers and I was inspired to write: To list or not to list. I'm waiting for Quentin Rieser's book to arrive in the mail today.
Finally, having nothing to do with birding, I finished reading Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing of and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale by Gillian Gill, published in 2014. I'm a slow reader so it took me a while to finish. It will be the best book I read in 2025 and I felt compelled to attempt to write a review. This is a review of the sort that I do not feel qualified to write, but it turned out okay, I think. But then I was reading a 10,000 Birds blog post and I was reminded that I had left something important (to me anyway) out of my review. So I wrote: Florence Nightingale and her Little Owl.
I have some other ideas of writing for the 10,000 Birds blog. It is a fun blog. It's an international site, has a very engaged editor who is also a birder, and I encourage others to look it up and subscribe. After all, none of us can watch, listen or read about politics all day. Now is not a good time to put our heads in the sand (unfortunately, I have never been able to put my head in the sand, despite having examples all around me of how to do it), but even still it's important to have a diversion.
So this summer I wrote. You could argue that this also means that, true enough, I didn't do much. But this is not true. Writing about birds has helped me find the strength to pay attention to our Democracy and not put my head in the sand. I can't write if I have my head in the sand.
As the new posts I write come out, I'll also publish them here.
