One week from today we will celebrate Squirrel Appreciation Day … or rather, “some of us” will celebrate. My husband has heard people complain about squirrels and asked, “How many members in the squirrel fan club? Three?”
If you have bird feeders, squirrels are often the mammal you love to hate.
An acrobatic eastern gray squirrel reaches Marcy Cunkelman’s feeder, Nov 2010 (photo by Marcy Cunkelman)
Ornament at Phipps Holiday Magic, 18 Dec 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
1 January 2026
Are you starting a new Year List of the birds you’ve seen in 2026? I don’t usually bother with Year Lists but I like to play Last Bird / First Bird.
My Last Bird of 2025 would have been a rare bird if I’d seen it in Pittsburgh but we are visiting family in Kutztown, PA which is in the Eastern Flyway. Thus at 8:30pm I heard a small flock of snow geese (Anser caerulescens) flying over in the dark.
This recording of a much larger flock is more than I heard but the “yaow” sounds are diagnostic.
For First Bird of 2026 I tried to find the snow geese in the field across the way. None there, probably because there was a fierce 15-minute snow squall at 4:05am and the wind is still very strong. But as I looked at that field, seven starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) flew over it. Oh well.
Phipps Conservatory decorated for the Holiday Flower Show, 2018 (photo by Kate St. John)
Indoors …
In the orchid room, Phipps Conservatory, 18 Dec 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)Orchids by the window, 18 Dec 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)Shrimp plant in the ocean theme, 18 Dec 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
And outside after 5:00pm … Phipps Outdoor Garden at night.
Phipps Holiday Magic, 18 Dec 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)Through the arch, 18 Dec 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)Phipps Outdoor Garden at night, 18 Dec 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
Coming soon, the 126th Christmas Bird Count (CBC) runs Sunday 14 Dec 2025 through Monday 5 Jan 2026. It’s a great time to get out and see birds.
The CBC is an annual tradition, coordinated in the U.S. by the National Audubon Society. Each “Count” is a 15-mile diameter circle manned by volunteers who count all the birds they see in a single 24-hour period. Each circle has a Compiler who makes sure there’s no birding overlap. As I write this, Compilers for Sunday’s counts have already mobilized volunteers and are assigning local coverage areas within their circles.
In North America the circles are densely packed in metro areas.
In the Pittsburgh area there are 14+ circles. Just west of Pittsburgh the Imperial CBC, centered on Imperial, PA, will be this Sunday. The “Pittsburgh” CBC, which includes the City of Pittsburgh, is on 27 December and compiled by Brian Shema at ASWP.
It’s easy to participate. Volunteer to count at your own feeders or out in the field. But first, be sure to call or email the compiler to confirm your assignment. Compiler contact information is on the map(*).
I’ll be counting at the Pittsburgh CBC on the Saturday after Christmas. My main assignment will be counting crows and I’ll need your help. Stay tuned for more info.
Now’s the time to count.
(*) To find a Compiler’s contact info go to this link and zoom in on the map until you can see the circle you want. Click on the colored hawk icon for Compiler information.
Crows staging at Schenley Plaza and Frick Fine Arts, 9 Dec 2025, 5:14pm (photo by Kate St. John)
10 December 2025
Pittsburgh’s Christmas Bird Count is coming up on Saturday 27 December and I’ve volunteered to count crows. I know from years past that there are 10,000 to 20,000 of them but counting is a challenge.
Yesterday evening Charity Kheshgi and I tried to count crows as they came into the trees near the Frick Fine Arts building in Oakland. We’d tallied 3,000 – 4,000 crows before sunset (4:53pm) but after that huge flocks arrived from all directions. And then they started swirling.
Counting was impossible so I took photos and videos with my cellphone and kept the original audio.
So many crows!
Crows in Oakland, Pittsburgh, 5:00pm 9 Dec 2025 (video by Kate St. John)
Birders’ Reunion with Ted Floyd, Frick Park, 6 Dec 2025 (photo by Cathy Qureshi) From Ted Floyd’s Facebook page: “Frick Park Legends, the reunion tour. We used to go birding together, right here at Frick Park, when I was in high school 40 years ago. L.–r.: Lester O., Eric H., Jack S., Lydia K., Mark V., me, Mike F.”
8 December 2025
On Saturday 6 December Ted Floyd was in town for an outing in Frick Park that included a reunion with all the folks he birded with “back in the day.” His sister, Cathy Qureshi, took this photo from the perfect spot. (I was there but my photo was so lousy that I deleted it.)
After the outing we adjourned to the Environmental Center for donuts, coffee and an opportunity for a book signing of the National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of the United State and Canada, Second Edition that come in EAST, WEST and all regions. EAST is, of course, my favorite. See WEST and all regions at the end.
There are many Pittsburgh connections to this Second Edition. The author is Ted Floyd who grew up in Pittsburgh, the project manager is Pittsburgher Adrienne Izaquirre, and there are loads of advisors. See the Acknowledgments page 435.
My EAST and WEST editions were already signed by Adrienne and Frank (one of the advisors) Izaguirre and their daughter Maya who was present at many Zoom meetings. Thank you, Adrienne!
book is signed!
Why two volumes? They are easier to carry.
Do EAST and WEST books make a hard line at the Rocky Mountain border? No. Birds can end up traveling to the other side of any boundary. One of the best pages to illustrate this is page 402 of cardinalids. Black-headed grosbeak is not on the EAST map but he does show up in the East occasionally, so he’s on the page.
My favorite thing about the EAST edition are Ted’s mini-essays that provide more background, tips, or fun facts. “Field ID of Empidonax flycatchers” on page 256 describes the ID steps for yellow-bellied, acadian, alder, willow, and least flycatchers. I sometimes forget these steps during fall migration when the birds aren’t singing (song is the easiest way to ID them).
Ted points out that after you narrow the visual ID (pictures) to a group of similar birds, look at where the bird is and what it is doing. Open or leafy? Sitting or flitting? This is just one of 5 paragraphs of tips on empids.
Start by asking, Is the bird even an empid? The similar wood-pewees are a bit longer and especially longer-winged; they sit motionless on dead snags, whereas empids typically forage from leafier microhabitats. The drab tail-wagging Eastern Phoebe (p.262) lacks the empids’ wing bars and eye rings and usually occurs in more open habitats.
[There are no mini-essays in the WEST edition because there are so many species, including Hawaii.]
Some reviewers panned the books for being taxonomically out of date before they went to print (taxonomy is 2023; publication is 2025) but I differ with that opinion. I know that book production is a long process and these were 3 books in production simultaneously. Page layout is tricky (which species should be on the page? which illustrations to use? Does it look ugly when you lay it out?) Ultimately you have to pick the point where you cannot make major changes such as reshuffling or rewriting for new taxonomy. And nowadays every bird book is taxonomically out of date before it’s printed. These books came out just before eBird’s big taxonomy change in October 2025 which, by the way, is ongoing through October 2026.
In fact my only gripe is that the print is small and thin so I must read it in good light. Or maybe it’s my eyes.
Duck Hollow on a misty morning, 22 Nov 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
24 November 2025
Last Outing Before Winter!
Join me at Duck Hollow on Sunday 30 November 2025, 8:30am to 10:30am for a bird and nature walk.
Meet at the Duck Hollow parking lot at the end of Old Browns Hill Road. Dress for the weather and wear comfortable walking shoes. Bring binoculars, field guides and a birding scope if you have them.
When Charity Kheshgi and I stopped by there on Saturday we had three Best Birds: An immature tundra swan (see yesterday’s article), an immature male yellow-bellied sapsucker …
Immature male yellow-bellied sapsucker, Duck Hollow, 22 Nov 2025 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
… and an immature male Cooper’s hawk that flew up to this pole after a bath in the creek. He was so small and so wet that we had a hard time figuring out his species ID. Was his tail square as for as sharp shinned hawk? We had to use other clues.
Coopers hawk at Duck Hollow, 22 Nov 2025 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
What Best Bird will show up next Sunday? Will the swan still be there? Come to Duck Hollow and see.
As always, remember to check the Events page before you come in case of changes or cancellations!
“Birds are classically among the most monogamous of all organisms,” wrote Frank B. Gill in his textbook Ornithology. 90% of bird species form a pair bond in which they commit to work together to raise their young. Swans are well known for it.
Fortunately that type of rivalry is lost in the mists of time.
Humans still value monogamy, which for our species is a spectrum from lifelong to short commitments. People pair up, form partnerships, marry, perhaps divorce, perhaps remarry.
Maintaining a long marriage is hard work. People change over time, sometimes incompatibly. So my husband and I are lucky. We’ve weathered the ups and downs and are even closer now than we were 20 years ago.
A good man is hard to find. I’m very lucky. Today we’ve been married 50 years.
Happy Belated Birthday to the blog! YesterdayOutside My Window turned 18 years old; I published my first article on 9 November 2007.
Birthdays are a good time to look back at the past year. As of this morning I’ve written 6,652 articles but not all of them are winners.
Typical readership at Outside My Window drops to 700 readers per day in the depths of winter and soars to 4,000 during peregrine excitement in the spring, so I was stunned by a single winning blog post that blew those old statistics out of the water.
Google Analytics for birdsoutsidemywindow.org, 9 Nov 2024 to 9 Nov 2025
Rare Sighting of a Rare Snake brought in 47,488 readers in five days! This is 13+ times the usual traffic for November 1-5 thanks to Jim Chapman’s photos. 39 people were moved enough to comment, some with fear, others with love. I probably won’t see anything like this for another decade.
Eastern massasauga rattlesnake in Pennsylvania, 29 August 2025 (photo by Jim Chapman)
Another surprise was the sudden interest in an article from January 2015 when 6,700 bots(?) each spent one second looking at That’s Close Enough in late September.
Emu closeup (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
Looking back: What has changed in 18 years? I have, and so has the climate.
In my first article, Waiting for Tundra Swans, I anticipated swans migrating over Pittsburgh in early to mid-November. Eighteen years later the swans come at the end of November because the northern lakes don’t freeze as soon due to climate change.
Tundra Swans migrating (photo by Chuck Tague)
Thank you! Dear Readers, thank you for your enthusiasm. I couldn’t have blogged every day for 18 years without your feedback. Also a big thank you to all the photographers who let me use your photos. I’ve made a lot of new friends.
