Shannon O’Mac
@shannonomac
Physician. Parent. Your weird queer aunt in the woods (Upstate NY). she/they/🏳️🌈 Mostly thinking about birds, trees, and dirt. I love the library. 📚 (Not medical advice)
Morning bird report from the porch 🪶 A quiet day with a wildfire smoke tinted sunrise.
Today I was delighted by a Monarch Butterfly on the Milkweed plant by our mailbox!
With a video of a baby raspberry plant to get the audio experience of the morning birds. 😍
PSA: this is a giant patch of poison ivy. Eek! Seen outside a park nearby. Leaves of three, let them be!
Tick season is upon us! I’ve pulled ticks off both kids this week. One was hiding in a belly button. They are TINY! I’m glad we have a solid family routine of evening tick checks (+bug spray).
Went to the forest hoping for good vibes. Instead, I found a canopy full of beech leaf disease. 😔 They’ll all be dead in the next 5 years. Ooph. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beech_l...
Morning bird report! A house finch landed in the porch railing. Merlin didn’t pick up the crows and raven in the distance. The Yellow Warblers are delightful pops of color in the brush. 🪶
Happy Pride! I’m getting back into making friendship bracelets (thanks kids). A great application for my medical one-handed knot-tying skills. ☺️
It’s backyard black raspberry season!!! These grow wild all over the place in our area. They love hanging out with the black walnut trees in our yard. A wild abundance to remind me that the earth loves us back. 🥰
Mocking bird said hi today! They really wanted to show off their extensive repertoire. 👏👏🪶
I got really confused learning about “volunteer” garden plants. (Plants that grow on their own) Most of my gardening is - what happens when I do nothing? (So many baby walnut trees). Given that, what should I do to tend things in the right direction? (And what even is the right direction?) 🤔
There’s a silky dogwood by our drive way that is *thriving.* The flowers smell delicious right now. It’s so lovely to have a native plant doing their thing with water and wildlife! I am excited to try to propagate it with cuttings.
ADHD is such a trip. Bouncing around all over the place and forgetting to eat. My brain feels like my dog looks sometimes.
Bird report! I think most of these were legit. The indigo bunting keeps popping up but I haven’t seen it yet. The green heron id was almost definitely the mocking bird. It was high up on a wire and doing the obvious “check out all my songs” medley when that ID popped up.
I went on a sunset birds and smells walk with my dog. He smelled all the smells, and I said hello to a blue bird *and* a mockingbird on the electric wires. The blue bird was chatty, and the mocking bird was very pleased to show off their many imitation tricks (sea gull! Alarm! Green heron!). 🪶
I’m deep into the audiobook for The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by @shannonchakraborty.bsky.social. An incredible tale with wonderful storytelling! I’m riveted. Good stories are so helpful for making it through these hard times. 🙏
This week I got to visit a preschool classroom & make pride flags with 4 year olds & it was epic. Your pride flag is a tiger? Fantastic. Yours has all the colors? Love it. All hearts and spirals? Amazing. 🌈 Embracing diversity & loving on the littles is the future I am here for.
In a past life, I was fascinated by the science of emergence and complex systems in the Emergency Department. (Still cool, but burnout real). Now I’m in love with forest ecology & management. Emergence, again. The overarching strategies for nurturing & tending complex systems work in both.
We have a honeybee swarm in the backyard. 🫣 Thankfully we live in a land of beekeepers, one of whom is in the way to try to convince them to live in a box at her house. 🤞 Apparently this means that the swarm from a few years ago that set up house in a hollow tree is doing well & looking to expand.