When I take pictures of our avian cousins, I’m usually attracted to birds that are interesting in some way. Cute baby geese. Colorful hummingbirds. A lovely egret. A magnificent heron. But what about the blue-collar birds? It’s not their fault that they’re boring. Don’t they deserve pictures too?

You bet. And what’s more ordinary than a finch? So I undertook to photograph one. But precisely because they’re so ordinary, I wanted an extra nice photo and eventually I got this one. And while it’s a nice picture, I have to say that this is one tubby little finch, isn’t it? Irvine must be bursting at the seams with delicious worms. Or whatever it is that finches eat.

UPDATE: Apparently this is a song sparrow, not a finch. How about that? And judging from a few pictures, song sparrows all tend toward the chubby side. This fellow, it turns out, is pretty ordinary.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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