Birthday cake and candy sprinkles (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

10 November 2025

Happy Belated Birthday to the blog! Yesterday Outside 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.

Happy Birthday, Outside My Window! 

p.s. This is my blog’s birthday, not my birthday. I’m a heck-uv-a lot older than 18!