I'm supposed to be blogging. One of my friends told me that I should post something at least once a week. I haven't posted anything in almost a year. Ooops.

I didn't mean for it to turn out this way. I did a whole bunch of cool stuff last year. I saw 100 new birds, and went to some of the most beautiful places. I guess there was just so much to write about that once I fell behind, I just was too overwhelmed to catch up!

So, my pseudo-Watson year is over. I am no longer living as a nomad. I have a place to live! And I am going to try to actually do something resembling a blog. I always forget that I'm not writing for college anymore, and I can just spit out whatever!

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Today I started to explore my new home of Hudson, NY. It is very different from Annandale. It's a city. There are a LOT of Pigeons. And a lot of buildings.

But in a little corner of Greenport, just seven minutes from my little apartment, is the Greenport Conservancy. It's a beautiful little place. There are fields of Goldenrod, Milkweed, and Purple Asters. The sky is piercingly blue. Monarch butterflies float through the sky like wisps, dancing across the flowers. I love these kind of days. When I pluck some of the fluff from a Milkweed pod and let them go, they flutter away just like the butterflies. It is incredibly beautiful, almost achingly so, and the proximity of this late summer day to fall makes me ache with nostalgia.

A small flock of Cedar Waxwings descends into the Goldenrod in the field in front of me. In the late afternoon sun, their creamy, waxy bodies look as though they are sunburned. Each one lands on an individual stalk of yellow, and their weight makes the flowers bob up and down. Sometimes the bobbing is so extreme that the Waxy has to leap off the plant and hover in place like a hummingbird. I have never seen Waxies behave this way. It is endearing, even as I see one alight close to me and swallow an enormous spider. It occurs to me that Waxwings are actually riding the stalks down into the thick of the plants to pick out insects that would be hard to reach otherwise. Brilliant.