Rating all the snacks from the vending machine at work whether I’ve eaten them or not

Just what it says on the tin. Let’s go top to bottom, left to right. My rating is 1-5, with 5 good and 3 average, each point roughly corresponding to a standard deviation.

• Cape cod potato chips — a fine chip, but nothing to write home about. Cape cod chips are relatively lower calorie which they claim is due to less oil but I think the chips are so razor thin the feeling of greasiness is much more. (Note: this does not constitute a formal challenge to the cape cod company’s chip claims in a court of law.) I think the texturing of the bag interior clings onto the grease in a way the big chip boys have engineered around so you get a nice mono layer on the hand as you reach in. It’s probably printed on the bag — never bothered to look — but I feel there’s a 50/50 shot these chips are actually manufactured on cape cod versus in Arkansas or elsewhere. The MA coast is not known for its potatoes or its oils. The image of a salt-sprayed lighthouse and its keeper does not convey him munching out of a little plastic bag of greasy chips. Maybe it’s something about the salt? 3/5

• Cape cod potato chips, bbq — Cape cod company does not understand the subtleties of mesquite flavor. 2/5

• Cheese ruffles — The continued obsession with a cheese flavored chip is mystifying. The sour cream and onion chip replicates the experience of dip, that is, overwhelming the original chip flavor. Then to replace onion with cheese is to overwhelm any subtleties in the dip. Each chip is like a little slice of cheese with a pat of butter on it. The perverse suggestion from the ruffles company (ridged for your pleasure) is that you should then take this twice-subverted chip and dip it again, become alike Shiva, the flavor destroyer. 2/5

• Flamin’ doritos — I’ll say it: I don’t like the flaming dust that has become so popular on chips. It makes a much better snack on mango (dried or fresh) or even on taakies where (fact checkers are writing in) there’s a little lime to balance everything out. Doritos here is particularly despicable in abandoning their commitment to cheese. Cheetos are already a pretender to the spicy snack throne which makes these the Renly Baratheon of snacks. 1/5

• Cool ranch doritos — An all time classic. I think I am actually allergic to the cool ranch dust. 4/5

• “Normal” doritos — The Doritos company messed up when they released the “retro” taco flavor. Nacho Doritos turn to ash in my mouth. 3/5

• White cheese pop corner — Despite the careful engineering of multiple flavors, a consistent modern brand aesthetic, and a Super Bowl ad that made me feel deeply uncomfortable for Aaron Paul, popcorners have failed to become part of the cultural lexicon. Previously this machine also stocked a caramel version which has been yanked from the shelf. As a snack they’re pretty good, basically a slightly upgraded version of the Quaker Oats rice cakes that weird friend’s parents would reliably have in my youth. I think the issue is there’s only like 6 chips in the bag. Once the flavor boys in the skunkworks got the taste dialed in the nutritionists freaked since they promised less than 150 a bag and some spin doctor on the filling line did the rest. They leave you wanting, and desire is what drives people to change their lives. That’s dangerous. 3/5

• Cape cod potato chips again — I hope somebody got fired for this. 1/5 this time only

• Cheese sun chips — Or variously garden salsa. Sun chips, a great concept, have fallen victim to American market pressure (more cheese!) and created a middling chip. The cheese is more appropriate here than on ruffles and the dust is somewhat easier to clean away. Perhaps cheese chips can atone by including Colonel’s Wipes along with each bag. I do worry about sun chips — I recently checked the flavoring on a bag of garden salsa only to find… it contains cheese. Must every chip be a cheese chip? 3/5

• Cheetos — “Cheeto finger” is no urban legend. More often than not I pass on these extremely calorie dense extrudates for fear of what my keyboard might become. 3/5

• Flamin’ cheetos — I’ve made my feelings clear here. It is kind of messed up that they invented a fake history and movie about a proud factory worker (janitor? accountant? exact job escapes me) who pitched this billion dollar innovation. This is like Pepsi commissioning a movie about Caleb Bradham humbly approaching soda giants with a smile in his heart and saying “what if it was brown!” and in this alternate universe Coke does not exist. Inadvertently this is also indirectly disrespectful to the similar story of the guy who really did invent nachos as a concept. (Which deepens the sin of second-generation Doritos, who built their empire on the contributions of Mr. Ignacio.) These are more pleasantly chewy than Doritos though. 2/5

• Deep river potato chips, onion flavor — The deep river brand lays their folksy vibe on a little thick and their flavor dusts a little heavy, but they make a sturdy chip. Unlike a lot of these snacks, this is a chip that would pair well with some actual food rather than desperately scarfed. A noble dream for this rarely purchased loner. 3/5

• Zapp’s jalapeño chips — While I like the structure and the idea in theory, the spice here doesn’t hit right. 2/5

• Zapp’s voodoo chips — Big dog. They hit the nail on the head here. 5/5

• Utz pretzels — Standout mention here for being the only Utz product represented and also the lowest fat snack in the machine. These are thin pretzels, which may or may not be in popular favor at the moment, but it hurts their dippability for highly viscous pairings like hummus. You need smaller holes to retain that fluid! Would like to see some rods or perhaps a honey mustard variant stocked. 3/5

• Cheese baked lays — The cheese chip crisis continues. Baked lays are a wonderful variant and a good medium between the chip and cracker. Why go for cheese? The baked lay itself has a delicious, subtle potato flavor. Why cheese it? Why?? 2/5

• Peanut m&m — The superior M&M. It’s got to be a lot of work to put each peanut in there without breaking the shell. If you get a regular m&m in a peanut bag, do you think they failed to sort it, or did they just fail to put the peanut in? 3/5

• Bag of little tiny snickers bars — Focus groups at Snickers HQ indicated more customers wanted to “feel like a giant” and their preferred eating method was “tossing back tiny things into my giant mouth and laughing ‘fee fi fo fum.’” What the hell? 1/5

• Fruit snacks — I sort of have egg on my face here about giants eating food because these are just little fruits but I’m giving them a pass. These are the normal ones and not the ones that pop like plague pustules. Surprisingly, that would increase the score for me. 3/5

• Nut mix (energy mix) — It’s billed as a nut mix, but overall this is mostly seeds, especially sunflower seeds. The addition of dried pineapple also feels like the decision of an intern on a deadline. Maybe Kar’s makes their business on the rejected mix-ins of other trail mix brands. Either way, they hit gold because it turns out a bunch of seeds is pretty good in like a Neolithic sense-memory kind of way. 4/5

• Raspberry jam cookies — A little dry, but these are probably in the 90th percentile for purchasable shortbreads (which are already ahead of most other snacks). Have them with tea. 5/5

• Tasty cake wafers — When I first made my gamer tag after playing my first “real” PC game (Portal) I picked a super obvious reference (tasty cake, because, get it? the cake? a lie?) but everyone online just asked me if I was from New Jersey. Only much later did I realize the sway this regional snack cake manufacturer has over peoples’ imaginations. Wafers are subpar. 2/5

• Sour worms — The USGS has denoted sour dust as one of the minerals critical to the US economy and therefore made it protected resource through 2050. The worms were not so lucky. I think sour worms would be improved if the underlying gummy closely resembled the unadorned worms instead of a mutilated peach ring. 3/5

• Some kind of big cookie — Not really interested in whatever’s going on here. 1/5

• Clif bar — The pitch on the back of a clif bar is that bikers (?) made it in their kitchen because they were tired of dry granola bars. I would have no idea how to combine known ingredients to make these textures and colors in an edible fashion, so good on the bikers for obtaining their CERTD in Culimancy. Nominally nutritious, these always feel like eating a Food Module from my Hab on Orbital Station Z6. 2/5

• Fig bar — Adulthood is the realization you enjoy dried fig paste. 4/5

• Regular m&m — I’m sure if I was in a foxhole in 1943 these little guys would hit different but I have an entirely different set of stressors I need to deal with. And I know a lot more about PowerPoint than those guys. 2/5

• Missing No. — Does it say something about how mindful of we are of our day to day lives that I can’t remember what’s in this slot? I’m sure I’ve bought it. Maybe mindfulness of vending machines is swinging the pendulum too far the other way back into mental illness. 

• Milky Way — Impossible to separate this item from Mr. Ciceriega's work where I learned the (possibly true?) fact that each bar has a quarter cup of milk in it. I know you've got to go to 3 musketeers for fluffy nougat, but something about adding caramel really compacts the nougat in the bar in a subpar manner. 3/5

• Twizzlers — I used to be a stalwart redvines fan, with twizzlers being the second-choice option. However in recent years I have come to appreciate the twizzler as its own unique entity and not a "bad" redvine. They are much chewier and at times sweeter. 

• Skittles — Their time is past. The age of skittles is over. They will decline, and go into the west. 2/5

• Reese’s cups — Impossible to overstate the disappointment of getting a "whole snack" only for it to be two things. 3/5

• “Big Kat” — The gloves are off. Kit kat, a candy whose whole identity is basically "you can break this candy into smaller pieces," has decided that is too noble a goal and gone forward with scaling up just one of the previously four wafers into a bloated monster with a completely screwy chocolate to cookie ratio. Admittedly, they have reintroduced the idea of "breaking" with a small lateral score mark halfway down the bar's length. No half measures, Big Kat. We've crossed the rubicon. 5/5

• PB crackers — One of the few items approaching (only approaching!)  actual food. Unfortunately the manufacturers here didn't calibrate the cracker strength for this particular vending machine height and the mock ritz powderize from the fall to the... receiving... zone. Whatever it's called in the vending machine. 3/5

• Six Oreos — This is just too many. A two pack or a four pack would have been enough. I know it's good to get value, but nobody has ever felt well after eating six oreos. 3/5

• Sour patch guys — I recently had the “ultra large” sour patch guys and I don’t know if I can ever go back. 3/5

• Famous Amos cookie bag — These have the unique staleness of doctor’s office cookies which is good for a little nostalgia bump. We may be past the window where Amos could reasonably be cancelled so it looks like his moniker is in for the long run. 3/5

• Mrs. Freshly’s little donuts — A cold donut is a dark object. Alligators will refuse to eat their prey if it doesn’t struggle in their grip. So goes the donut, where the once delicious hot grease has cooled into a palpably waxy hemolymph. 2/5

• Big Texas cinna roll — A previous professor would eat these with almost daily regularity. We’re talking about a 430 cal, frosted, high-sugar cinnamon roll. If you were truly brave, it might be possible to microwave it, but I'm not sure it would help. As a bonus, these are always expired. Still a go to for me. 4/5

• Vegan sour patch guys — Cruising for litigation. We can make gummy anything. Let’s see some innovation. Gummy oil rigs. 3/5

• Jumbo honey bun (2X) — It might surprise you but this 600 calorie bun, visibly sweating in its wrapper, is probably the best selling item out of the machine (hence the double stocking) I’ve found it excessively sticky, stale, and in places phase-separated like a day old donut. Which makes sense! But not for me. I imagine this might rejuvenate better dipped in coffee than the Big Texas, especially considering frosting, which may explain its performance. 2/5

• Chocolate pop tart — Puerile flavor. Strong indicator of low IQ. Once upon a time this was a slot for strawberry frosted tarts but as the US empire declines so does its infrastructure. 2/5

• Cinnamon pop tart — The thinking man’s tart. Best enjoyed with a smart tie and a sensible chuckle. Only limitation here is the lack of toasters near the office. 4/5

• Some goddamn Gum — C’mon now. What are we doing here. Save this stuff for kindergarten… the adults are talking. 1/5

• Salted almonds — A fine snack in isolation but here it demonstrates a weakness of the will. You’re almost always having an “energy mix” day or a “salted cashews” day. I think there’s a pretention factor involved here too, almonds simply get too much good press for how good they are. Possibly a result of counterpropaganda re: irresponsible CA water use or the almond milk lobby (when soy and oat are kicking your ass, hang up the towel!). Given the number of big names that hang around MIT for clout I assume they had these put in so Barry O. could enjoy his classic snack should he find himself in building 66 basement. “Salted” is doing a lot of the work for these little guys. 3/5

• Salted cashews — For straight shooters and proactive thinkers only. This constitutes a “power lunch.” 4/5

• Rice krispy treat — Only downside is it’s small. Ideal serving is a still warm mixing bowl but I’ll take what I can get. 5/5

• Combos — Not had the ones from this machine, but combos are basically the rock bottom of modern snacking. I’ve never gotten a clear picture (read: never dared to flip the packet over and learn the awful truth) but I wouldn’t be surprised if the second or third ingredient was “hot dog tallow” or similar. I’m not even sure they’re shelf stable. Eating these greasy little guys is a measure of extreme decadence and a sure sign you have lost your way somewhere. They come as a free add on for any death row last meal. Not turning them down though. 2/5

WHAT WE’RE MISSING (fare in other vending machines around campus):

• Utz party mix — a recent discovery for me. This is one of the least sensible mixes out there. Two pretzels (wheel and rod), cheese corn chips, regular corn chips, potato chips, and cheese fritos. Utz?? It works though. Give it a spin.

• Cup noodle — a vending machine in Stata has this for a dollar ten. That’s a (crappy) lunch almost at cost. 

• Captain’s wafers — So we’ll have every cheese chip under the sun but no cheese cracker? 

• Fritos — an un-dusted corn chip pairs with a lot of stuff. Something heartier about it than potato.

Corner Gas - Mid-series assessment

I’ll admit it: I’m a regular listener of Stop Podcasting Yourself. The era of the “guys chatting” podcast is long over — people often recommend me podcasts they tell stories or have non fiction investigations… not the point, people! — but I enjoy the general silly approach to humor on the show as opposed to most other “chat casts” which rely a lot on absurdism. (This is also the source for my favorite root beer joke.) Being a Canadian podcast their pool of guests is limited, so you tend to get more actually funny people rather than big names with stuff to promote. In general Canadian and American realities are more or less miscible but for their big blowout shows or specials they have Brent Butt, who is well known in the provinces for his work on something he referred to in his interviews as “cornugast” or variously “cornugast animated,” both of which sound like some ancient mage, the second after his conversion to lockdown (re-animated?). Only recently, after my years long campaign of reporting any internet advertisement I see as potentially harmful to life and limb (or for extra credit: Other, then write “Langford parrot situation”) did I start getting ads for a here-unnamed Canadian streaming service whose apparent flagship show is in fact “Corner Gas.” The Saskatchewan accent does no favors in an audio medium.

Being the obsessive and frequently-commuting person I am, I’ve now enjoyed half the series while on the train. The premise is that in a rural Canadian backwater, there exists a small town whose economy likely once relied on farming but now just persists, in which a small, successful gas station/cafe is run by the show creator’s self insert, Brent Leroy (Butt), a la Seinfeld. The show is always in summer and there are always new cars buying gas, so conflict arises from petty slights the residents deal each other and squabbles over minor changes. Overall, good! 

Some specific thoughts, in no particular order: 

• The writing, as it needs to be for a sitcom, is very good. There are few wasted lines and everyone is the appropriate level of witty while avoiding breaking character. 
• From an RPG perspective, this is almost the perfect setting for a social game. You can almost imagine the meta currencies being exchanged as townsfolk win small edges over each other. Pretty easy to write a playbook like “exchange one Grievance for two Rumors or one Favor.”
• Speaking of RPGs, C.G. has convinced me I need more “dopes” in my campaign. I tend to make NPCs with some degree of motive and have them respond more or less in agreement with their principles. In the show, Hank tends to cause a lot of plot friction or storyline crossover (vide infra) by not understanding basic stuff, or getting confused about what he actually wants. Better yet is Oscar, who is so focused on being contrarian that his responses are difficult to predict and veer into the absurd. Either as NPCs would add a great element of unreliability to a village.
• Corner gas is quite good at maintaining at least three storylines per episode, which I suppose is standard for sitcoms, but feels fresh to me (weirdly enough) after watching “prestige TV” where it feels almost mandated - people doing their storyline homework. Better Call Saul does this in places but often just gives it up to give you a few episodes straight up - which makes you realize, maybe that’s what they’d rather be doing all the time? I digress. Corner gas succeeds in this because they have a pretty limited set of characters so they are often crossing over between storylines which leads to extra, good misunderstandings. Continuity is well managed between these, with riffs on the same wordplay or ideas reappearing, but usually only for one party of the conversation, again introducing some friction by asymmetry. Being a sitcom, everything goes back to baseline by the end of episode, but you do occasionally see callbacks in later episodes where appropriate, which adds to the theme: there’s no change here because it’s a small town, not because it’s a show.
• There is something extremely appealing about the sort of (mythic) lives led by the residents, whose daily routine is more or less floating around and drinking coffee in a diner. I think I have watched 10,000 mugs of joe consumed in the forty odd episodes which is instilling a terrible craving in me. It’s nice to know that my long standing belief that the diner forms the cornerstone of American quasi-religious existence extends above the 50th parallel. 
• In one episode a new sandwich — the ruby club — was invented and became a smash success. The fact that its ingredients were never disclosed makes it my personal Dead Sea scrolls.
• In season one, the Oscar/Emma feud was not quite balanced. While in later seasons they fought just as much if not more, they also added some moments where they enjoyed each other’s company. This puts them more into the alignment with everyone else in the show, who have persistent problems that they secretly enjoy (e.g., Lacey complaining about small-town life while clearly reveling in the close contacts and her relative power in town).
• At the end of season one they floated a Brent/Lacey relationship…and thankfully rejected it. The show requires relationships to be volatile and pairings in a giving storyline to rotate. (For ex., Karen makes a good “straight man” pairing vs. Davis, but the role is flipped vs. Emma, whereas vs. Wanda you get some “rival” character… more bang for your buck, per character. You get it.) Adding a fixed link in there would have been too annoying to work around.
• Let’s get some snow! In season 3 you finally see a little winter in the Christmas episode, but it looks more like a thin layer of coastal sleet than the drifts you might expect. I suppose the show is designed to give the (possibly accurate) impression that rural Canadians only ambulate in the summer months, retiring to a cave of moose jerky and beer for hibernation.
• The premise of a combination liquor store and insurance agency is great stuff. 
• I honestly believe YouTube is the preferred viewing experience here. People tag the great bits and provide necessary Canadian context to American viewers. This is also how I learned of the fan theory that Hank is secretly the father of Wanda’s terror-child. In the words of one commenter, “the clues are all there but they never confirm it.” 
• Finally, the characters sorted by D&D alignment (more or less): 

LG: Lacey

NG: Emma, Fitzy

CG: Wanda

LN: Karen, Wes

TN: Brent

CN: Hank

LE: Davis

NE: Paul

CE: Oscar

Hoping the second half of the series holds up just as well. Supposedly they ended “at the top of their game” but often people just say that when other constraints force a decision. I’ll use the last 3 seasons’ quality to determine if a pass at the movie is worth it.

Chuck-will’s-widow twitch

 Rarely does something fall right into your lap… but it’s nice when it does! Scrolling the rare bird alert digest yesterday and saw there was a sighting of chuck-will’s-widow (henceforth CWWI) almost exactly across the river from work. I hemmed and hawed a little over running over, but when I saw the last confirmed sighting was 5 minutes ago, I had to go for it. Blake was on board as well as we’d already blocked the time out for the gym.

After a stressful power walk - will it be there? will this rain that’s starting up perturb it? - we came across a serene looking man with Jimmy Buffet vibes on the other side of the river. He just looked at us and said “did you see it?” Presumptuous but correct. “Three footbridges down,” said this birding/island life sage. We pressed on, and a young woman said something similar - “just over there, by night shift.” A few minutes later we saw the crowd, and then…

Well, it doesn’t look like much in my digiscoped photo. But it was a nice reddish brown color, with the weird nightjar shape one expects from field guides. It is simply Cool to see a bird that is so different from the typical layout. Passersby were less impressed. One college age chap with an English accent said something like “I have no idea what the hell that is” in reaction to everyone staring at a lump in a tree. But the birders knew. Birding Jimmy Buffet knew. 

If only twitching was always so close and so reliable, I would hit every one - and my performance at the gym and work would suffer. 

Kei trucks and transport

 Obsessed today with the idea of buying a kei truck. Picture below in case you aren’t familiar. According to a little reading I’ve been doing, they can haul realistic amounts of stuff (~1000-1500 lbs), have decent mileage (~35 mpg), and go at, uh, “highway legal” speeds (~55-60 mph). Getting one from the 90s is about $3500, or in brain speak, one vespa, three spotting scopes, seven bikes, or 35 trips to deluxe town diner (where I buy). So reasonable!

I do have a habit of making some purchases imagining that I have a different life than I currently do. For example, got a road bike maybe two years ago spurred on by visions of flitting off to go birding before work, unfettered by transit lines, popping over to places for a coffee on weekends, commuting in on sunny days. When the hell do I do that? My commute is long and often early, the odds of going birding before and wanting to bike more following turned out to be pretty low, and anyhow I wasn’t in any shape to properly use the super low drops on the road bike (why did I get that one??) I ended up finding online. Now, having actually used my bike recently, I may be turning the arc of the story around here, but I’m not discounting this as a cautionary tale yet.

What glamorous life am I picturing with a tiny truck? Hauling…something? Do I really want to be the guy all my friends call when they’re moving? Do I really want to be in a paper thin cab on the MA freeways, a state where the average car size is “heavyweight” and people skip through reds based on the “vibes” of a given intersection?

I’ve never owned a car, never really needed to. In some ways this sort of thing seems like… a trainer car. Low risk of killing people (in car-car collisions), easy to park, low cost investment if it turns out to be horrible. But not a trainer in the sense that it’s bad, people actually seem to rave over these things. Perhaps I am eager to reject the American car paradigm with a step into something just lighter. 

I won’t say part of it isn’t birding. Birding as a hobby is extremely car focused, and every rare bird twitcher talks incessantly about their birding battle station in the backseat, stopping at gas stations, sleeping in their car, whatever. It makes sense — wilderness areas are indeed further from urban centers — but the whole thing reeks of car supremacy culture in a way similar to the sneering that comes up whenever someone brings up electric cars (“That’d never work in a rural area!!”). Hence the bike. But is there a middle way? It would really be nice to autonomously chase some gull or whatnot 50 miles away. Otherwise, my autonomy tends to be limited by where train/bus lines run and my stomach for spending extra time trekking by foot. (Bike use pending.) I imagine that this desire for autonomy in my free time is sort of a reaction to the very rote, constrained nature of my day to day work. 

A kei car won’t change my life, ultimately. But it is useful to think about what I really want when I want things, in general. And we can all agree they look sick as hell. 

May big day 2024 recap

Tried for the big day, finding as many bird species as possible in a single day. Team consisted of myself and three close friends with various degrees of birding knowledge and experience. 

This is only my second spring big day. Last year we hit ~7 different locations in a mad dash to get a number of expected species at each one. Last fall we went to plum island and poked around there all day. After looking at the stats for may big day 2023, parker river NWR (plum island) I think blew any other hotspot out of the water in terms of total species, so going for high counts, this seemed like the spot. We were also restricted in terms of timing, so we decided to go for a very early morning to early afternoon “big half day.”

ANALYSIS OF STRATEGY

Pros:

- Very nice to have coast, forest, and marsh all squished together with no real travel time between

- Quality of species was exceptional, especially many migrating warblers acting very friendly, and piping plovers, which are basically only reliable in specially marked boxes (er, beaches) way out of cambridge hotspot range

- Many other birders to “draft” off of… nothing serious, but if you see thirty people with cameras, you’re inclined to take a look. Plus overheard tips “I heard there was scarlet tanager at pines trail,” etc.

Cons:

- The common species which should be layups we found to be not so easy! We left plum island missing stuff like ring billed gull, northern cardinal, red tailed hawk, great blue heron, carolina wren - backyard birds. (Some of these we made up from highway driving on the way home or there, but not all.) Furthermore some moderately common sightings (like any woodpeckers at all) and even some expected species (peeps) were just not present. (Not entirely true - at one point 30 peeps flew overhead but good luck IDing those.) 

-Distance to the island makes true sunrise birding hard. Ideally you’d be in position a half hour or so before sunrise for maximum effect, but with a 90 minute drive there that puts leave-the-house at 330 am which is tough.

-Distance to the island also makes it hard to casually hit up another spot - you are kind of committed, which makes it harder if you’d rather go somewhere else to find your common species.

-High chance of “fomo,” as you have to drive down the whole island to get to different spots, which leads to a lot of straining and struggling looking out the car window. Or for instance, we stopped 3 or 4 times on our way to our “first” stop because we didn’t want to miss the species that were present right then right there… even though most of them we picked up on a later list (but not all!).

Looking at our stats (non “incidental” or drive-by locations) hellcat loop stands out as particularly productive and the other locations less so, especially pines trail. I’m mainly focused on the “unique birds per minute,” which counts birds only found on one checklist. However, hellcat has the edge here of being earlier in the day.  If we had more time, I would have paired this with a visit to arlington reservoir or something to pick up our missing easy species. I think 90-100 could have been possible. (Spoilers for below: we did not get 90-100 species.)

TRIP HIGHLIGHTS AND THOUGHTS

From a birding perspective, highlight was seeing a way out of range yellow headed blackbird. They’re not supposed to be anywhere near here, so we couldn’t believe it, but all the ID matched up and later on other found it with pictures (and “cited” us, which was cool). We hadn’t even intended to stop where it was, just paused to look at some ospreys and 10 minutes later it flushed. My only lifer of the trip.

Getting up at 4 am definitely put some wear and tear on people. I say that we would pair with another afternoon visit for more species, but we may have needed to build in nap time.

Janice opted to go for binoculars instead of a camera this year. I think this was better for getting everyone on the birds and moving quickly , and without sandpipers we really didn’t need any photos for tricky IDs. But it does make people less impressed with your list when you’ve got nothing to show.

Food is essential. Egg bagels for breakfast, made that morning with great effort by Blake, chips and mini cinnamon rolls for snacks, Iggy’s bread sandwiches for lunch. 

Blake and Bhavish are newer birders than me so I wasn’t sure if it would be an annoying day of me pointing out stuff that people would miss (annoying to them, not me). As soon as we got on the walk to the hellcat loop (which was super crowded, even at 630 am!) they had both spotted warblers with correct ID. No worries there - everyone was great about spotting, calling, and looking for field marks so the final lists are in good parity.

It was very funny to see people’s clear ranking of the warblers. At one point on the hellcat boardwalk we had incredible views of ovenbird, black-throated blue warbler, northern parula, but everybody was straining like crazy to see the mostly obscured canada warbler.

I only regretted my scope choices for 1 checklist - didn’t take it for the pines trail but then absolutely needed it for the overlook when there was nothing in the forest at all.

Favorite find was probably black-throated blue warbler. Been a long time nemesis of mine and happy to get a great look. 

RESULTS AND OUTLOOK

Trip report: https://ebird.org/tripreport/236029

Overall we got 77 species on the trip. (I happened to find 2 more in my backyard that afternoon putting my ranking somewhere in the low hundreds for massachusetts. Improved over last year’s 70 species so really can’t complain.

Not sure if I’ll want to do the same sort of thing next spring or fall. This makes me want to do more birding in the essex area to try and build a map of reliable species the same way I (sort of) have for middlesex/suffolk. That way Parker river can be a stop and not the whole day. Alternatively, something like a “big sit” could be a fun alternative challenge. Would also like to try some night spots to get owls, etc.