I’m starting a bird-only playthrough of Pokémon X now. No idea how I’m going to get past the Electric gym, but I guess we’ll deal with that when we get there.

I just want to say that screech owls were done dirty when it should’ve been barn owls. Screech owls do not screech, they are adorable little birds that make adorable little noises, and their name is not accurate. Barn owls screech terrifying, hoarse screams in the middle of the night, and it’s horrible to hear them, and they should be the ones called “screech owls”.

It’s going to be too hot for me to open the door again later, so I’ll go ahead and say that day five of birding has concluded with five new additions:

Yellow-bellied flycatcher, wood thrush, bay-breasted warbler, palm warbler, and brown-headed cowbird.

The purple martin seems to start singing before any other songbird does. They’re beautiful birds and it’s nice to hear them after hearing no other birds except for one or two chuck-will’s-widows all night.

Going to call it early on day four of birding because I’ve already gotten more added to the list today than yesterday. Nine of them this time:

Cooper’s hawk, yellow-billed cuckoo, eastern wood-pewee, least flycatcher, cedar waxwing, northern house wren, Louisiana waterthrush, yellow-rumped warbler, and red-winged blackbird.

Only eight additions on day three of birding, but I’m pleased with them:

Canada goose, red-shouldered hawk, barred owl, eastern whip-poor-will, purple martin, barn swallow (aka Taillow), hairy woodpecker, and blue grosbeak.

Day two of birding has concluded, and it brought almost as many new bird IDs as the first. The app I use has some problems, but I’m learning to work around them and I think I’ve gotten better at confirming IDs. My bird list is up to 29 now, with 14 new additions:

Red-bellied woodpecker, great crested flycatcher, eastern kingbird, gray catbird, eastern bluebird, Swainson’s thrush, white-breasted nuthatch, warbling vireo, Nashville warbler, chipping sparrow, field sparrow, American goldfinch, indigo bunting, and common grackle.

I officially started birding today. And, on my first day, I was able to log 15 species, being careful to only log the ones I felt sure about the identification of:

Wild turkey, mourning dove, broad-winged hawk, chuck-will’s-widow, blue jay (my favorite bird), American crow, eastern phoebe (nesting on my house), Carolina chickadee, tufted titmouse, red-eyed vireo, orange-crowned warbler, house finch, summer tanager, northern cardinal, and eastern meadowlark.

The turkey, mourning dove, chuck-will’s-widow, blue jay, and crow have very distinctive sounds, but the other ten species are much more generic-sounding and therefore harder to verify (even though the northern cardinal would not stop singing the same thing it woke me up with all day long). And the weird thing is that, I guess, focusing so hard on it trying to identify it has caused me to keep hearing birdsong even though I know it stopped a long time ago... So that’s kind of worrying, but I still want to do it again tomorrow.

My favorite birds from different continents:

- The blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata) of North America,

- the hyacinth macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus) of South America,

- the Eurasian blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) of Europe (fun fact: this bird was the inspiration for Rookidee),

- the shoebill (Balaeniceps rex) of Africa,

- and the Indian peacock (male Pavo cristatus) of Africa (fyi: the female of the species is referred to as a peahen and the word for the males and females together is peafowl).

There are three Purrloin eggs lined up in the lab right now. Imagine if all four eggs were Purrloin.

I love blue jays with all of my heart. People constantly say things about them that aren’t true and are very misleading, and I just want to say that that’s very wrong. I’ve lived with them all my life but have come to appreciate them a lot more recently after learning more about them, and I’ve also recently learned about how badly people have treated them and continue to treat them and have been very upset by that.

I’m crazy about ermines, long-tailed weasels, and least weasels. The algorithm is showing me so many photos and videos of them in their winter coats flying through the snow, and I’m very happy about it.

I have a headache because I was just unfortunate enough to witness someone who gets paid to play Pokémon pitting an Absol against a Scraggy and using Bite on it instead of Slash MULTIPLE TIMES.

I guess every time there’s going to be one Gimmighoul I can’t find.

So I guess I’m just living with some creepy glowing eyes in the forest staring at me every night now. Not even joking. They look like stars in the forest, but two of them right next to each other so they look like some monster’s eyes. My father thought they were some animal’s eyes even though I told him that they haven’t moved at all (but can only be seen when it’s dark out). No idea what it is that’s giving off light or reflecting it.

This last egg I needed for the research took so long to find. And I feel like it’s taking as long as possible to hatch, too.

I’m really tired of being told that I don’t speak my language properly because I’m part of a diaspora population when the people saying that in fact speak in a way that’s much further away from the original pronunciation than my speech is. Sometimes people who moved away from their motherland maintained traditions better than those who stayed behind. Maybe because being in a strange place and feeling homesick made them hold on to what they knew more tightly. I don’t see why that’s so hard for people to understand. The fact that a language was named for a certain place over a thousand years ago does NOT mean that the people currently inhabiting that place speak the language any better than anyone else.

I think I can pretend to like warm weather until May is over, but then I’ll really need to skip over June, July, and August and get ready to enjoy spooky season.

When is the Cornlet line finally going to be added to the Pokédex?

23rd attempt failed, too. I’m done. Spending a bunch of money on the fair games that never work correctly but are differing degrees of broken each time they’re played, and having to check in constantly to see when they’re recharged and keep trying over and over again but getting absolutely nothing in return, definitely makes the fun fair my least favorite event.