ARLINGTON, TEXAS — Rock Pigeons. Great-tailed Grackles — bowling pins on wings. House Sparrows. Great Egret. Gull high away.

I’m always birding, but sometimes the commute is all the time I’ve got.

2005 was an unrepeatable year. Great Gray Owls, Evening Grosbeaks, Hudsonian Godwits, Willie-wagtails, White-tailed Tropicbird, Superb Fairywrens, Red-bellied Fruit-Doves. American Woodcock, Pyrrhuloxias, Chihuahuan Ravens. I didn’t manage to keep a year list, but it would have been sweet. I know there were over 100 life birds.

But after all that, my life list is still comparable to what one crazed birder can see in one oversized state in one very lucky year.

By the end of 2006, that sobering fact will no longer be true. I’m not keeping a list this year either. It’s fun … for the first day or two, and I always sort of wish I’d done it in the end. Maybe I’m too lazy, but I’d like to think it isn’t that.

Our New Year’s Day nightjar is likely to have been a Common Poorwill, according to some Texbirders, including Mark Lockwood. The species’ wintering habits are still poorly known. Evidently they can enter deep torpor and tough out some winters. It can’t be listed of course. Didn’t see it well enough for that, unfortunately.

My time in the United States (if all goes according to plan) is now measured in weeks, not months.

I won’t be sitting still for any of that time. I’m hoping for Snowy Owls and Florida Scrub-Jays, but who can say what the future holds.

Meanwhile, the British words keep ringing in my ears: “There are birds of paradise in Ukarumpa! I’ve seen four species on the ridge!”

ARLINGTON, TEXAS — “Ordinary” birds are far more colorful than we give them credit for. I’m working at home today — the first Saturday I’ve been home in a month or more. Proposals are due Monday, and I’m looking at people and lands from far across the sea. But the birds outside keep me anchored in my own time and place.

The cock robin has left the perch where he sat for long minutes, silently looking around. His deeply colored breast feathers had delicate fringes of white. His head was quite black, and his throat was streaked with white. His bill almost glowed, even in the shade, but it cooled to black near the tip.

A house sparrow had one pure white flight feather. It was nestled among the others, which were black and brightly edged with brown.

Yellow-rumps’ sides gleamed like beacons, and the glinting, fiery blue of the jays almost took my breath away. They pinned morsels against twigs with capable feet, and they pounded them with strong, hooked bills.

But they’ve all moved on for the moment, and only the distant roar of jets wafts through my slightly open window. That, and a gentle breeze. I should be getting back to work….

ARLINGTON, TEXAS — Running a few minutes behind, I heard the robins on my way to the car. Four cormorants flew over the parking lot. There were the White-winged Doves along Arkansas, and the gulls over supermarket corner as usual.

By noon, I was ready to spend the last 30 minutes of the year in the park across the street. But the car was dead — lights left on in my haste. Blast.

I sat to eat on the large rocks beside our building and watched a Great Egret in the pond. Yellow-rumps flew back and forth, calling insistently. Rock Pigeons soared overhead sometimes.

My back was to the sun, which warmed me unless the wind puffed. So this is the end of the solar year, the solar year I set out to chronicle as I huddled by my parents’ house in Missouri, waiting for the very first bird.

I had been excited to observe the year not according to our quirky calendar, but according to our little planet’s movement round the sun. This is how I said it then:

At the winter solstice, the sun hovers briefly over the Tropic of Capricorn, leaving the Northern Hemisphere cold and dark. Summertime birds have fled to the tropics; northern birds have abandoned their homes, flying hundreds of miles in search of food. College students (also driven by hunger) have gone home for Christmas. And then, slowly, the sun begins to clumb, up past the equator and on to the Tropic of Cancer, pushing the birds north as it goes, to sing and mate and raise their families. As days grow hotter, the birds cease to sing, the hemisphere begs for relief, and eventually, the sun retreats, back to the underbelly of the world. That is the story of the New Year. That is the story I wanted to tell.

I quickly abandoned the list I’d set out to keep. I hadn’t yet conceived of a blog, and I stopped writing for a season too. Newspapers to put out, you know, and one last academic push.

Then my notions went topsy-turvy when I flew to that “underbelly of the world.” Suddenly it was winter again — though you certainly couldn’t tell by the weather. My narrow perspective was broken open wider.

There were four scaup in the pond, a female in the lead and three males close together behind her. A diminutive grebe rested on the water. Then it was time to go back to work.

THE METROPLEX, TEXAS — I sat down by the back door to eat my cereal this morning, and I was shocked to see that the seed bell was no longer hanging where it had for weeks. The paper clip chain was shorter than usual, so I suspect that a fox squirrel leapt onto the bell, breaking the chain and sending the bell (and the squirrel?) down three stories to the ground below. It must have been a sight.

When I finished eating, I stepped out onto the balcony and looked over the railing. I could not see the seed bell anywhere. Perhaps a maintenance worker had already carried it away. Well, it’s a good riddance, I guess. I will not make any further attempts at bird feeding while I live here.

I noticed, while on the porch, that our resident pigeon has made a horrible mess on the pavement. I immediately constructed a pointy hat of tinfoil for the light fixture. I hope the piebald bird will take a hint and move along.

I ended up doing a lot of driving today, trying to tie up some loose ends for my PNG visa application. Coming up 1382 just after four, I saw hundreds of cormorants streaming toward Joe Pool Lake in large, irregular V’s.

As the sun set, I pulled into a parking lot at River Legacy. Three egrets had flown over on my way in, and gulls were leaving the landfill, headed who knows where. A red-tail flew low over the field, and a cardinal and a Carolina Wren carried on in the brush.

A Song Sparrow barked somewhere ahead of me, and then a large sparrow flew into view with a high, thin call. It didn’t sound like a Song Sparrow, I thought as I lifted my binocs, but perhaps that was a flight call.

But there was the sooty face and pink bill of a Harris’s Sparrow. And a another! The pair didn’t stay still for long, but I watched them until they disappeared.

I trudged around through the crunchy brown vegetation, seeing a few Song Sparrows as I looped back toward the parking lot.

An insistent call pulled me toward a brushy area, and in the fading light, I just barely saw a bird fly up into a small tree. White-crowned Sparrow. Gorgeous.

I took a few steps closer. More birds flushed.

On the left, two striking white-morph white-throats. Then a Harris’s. And, was it? Yes, the white-crowned was still in its spot to the right. Incredible. First the Melospizas, and now the eastern Zonotrichias.

The Harris’s barely gave me time to be excited, quickly flushing deeper into the brush.

I stayed by the edge, tantalized by movement, rustling, and calls. But the light was too far gone. A woman showed up with her dog, and I headed for home, aware that my sweatshirt wasn’t quite enough to fend off the evening’s chill.

ARLINGTON, TEXAS — Sleet and freezing rain sent us home from the office about lunch time. It’s currently 27 degrees with a windchill of 16, and it’s headed downward from here. Yes!

Bright-burning leaves.

The Bradford pear outside my apartment window is radiant, but I fear this weather will finish off the brilliant pennants one by one. A jay hopped among the branches, startlingly blue.

It’s sleeting harder now. I hear the soft sound of ice against the leaves. Then, movement. A cardinal! A flash of blue. And three Yellow-rumped Warblers.