4/13/26
birds
i went down to Faxon Park today, i've walked past it many times but never been inside. it's pretty rad! it's got several trails of varying difficulties, a couple of baseball diamonds, at least one playground, and a disc golf course. i walked a decent chunk of the easiest trail, which was a bit of a struggle with my rollator; i think if i go again i'll have to just use a cane.
before i meant to start birding i found a nice flat rock and sat down to eat my lunch, but halfway through i heard an unfamiliar call that sounded very close, so i started Merlin up and looked around. turns out there was a red-bellied woodpecker on a tree maybe 20 or 30 feet away! there was a woodpecker that hung out around the last apartment i lived in in SLC that i saw a few times, but this was the first time since then that i've seen one! after i finished eating i walked a bit further, and stopped at some of the benches. i stayed a while at the first bench, there were pretty constant robin calls but i was having trouble picking anything else out (Merlin had at least one false positive of an egret when i moved the straw in my drink and it made that horrible plastic screech, lol). eventually i noticed some flitting at the top of a tree, which turned out to be a golden-crowned kinglet, which i watched for a while. after that, i was just scanning to see if i could find anything, and i noticed something red near a nest in a tree pretty far away. i walked a bit further up the trail to see if i could get a better look, but either i lost the angle or it had flown away, so i ultimately have no idea what it was. could've been a cardinal, i definitely heard the call, or maybe another woodpecker, but it just as well could have been a finch. oh well. i kept going and eventually saw a tufted titmouse quite clearly hopping around a tree! i assume it's not the one that was eluding me yesterday, but i was still delighted to see it!
towards the end of the path i finally found where all the robins were hanging out (the grass at the more open end of the trail), and since i was at just about an hour i decided to call it there. then i walked a bit further to find a trash can, and saw a bird hopping down a tree directly in front of me. i got a good sighting on it and was able to narrow it down to a white-breasted nuthatch! so i started a new checklist and looked around to see what i could find, which was mostly robins. i heard a cardinal calling real close, but still wasn't able to spot it, and then i heard it progressively further away. it's not like i've never seen a cardinal before, but it would still be nice to make it Official™️ on eBird. i also saw some sort of raptor soaring quite a ways away, i even managed to get it in my binoculars, but i still couldn't make out enough detail to identify it at all. oh well!
i've obviously seen many more birds in my life than i've been able to record, and it's possible i had even seen some of the birds i saw today (other than the robins), but if so i'd never known what they were, so it's really exciting to get so many genuine lifers in one trip!