In the catbird seat

Kind of a quiet day for me today picture-wise, despite it being an absolutely beautiful spring day. Actually, that could be part of the reason why—it was the sort of day where you just want to sit outside and savor the warmth and sunshine, especially after the long winter.

I took this first picture at work as I sat on the platform next to our small casting pond, as I really liked how the brown of the fish stood out against the bright green:



I shot the rest of today's pictures right next to my apartment building. There's a thin stretch of woods that extends south from the edge of our lawn, separated from the complex by a chain-link fence. It made things a bit more interesting, since if I wanted to shoot anything on the ground level I had to do so with my lens right against one of the openings in the fence.

As I scanned the terrain I heard some rustling in the leaves, finally pinpointing the source—it was a bird, but one I didn't recognize at first glance. So I took a few pictures, trying to work around both the fence and the bird's propensity for staying in the brush, and after I downloaded the images I opened up one with a relatively clear look at the bird and started thumbing through my Sibley guide. For once I actually lucked out, as Mr. Sibley says that "no other species is uniform slaty gray" but this one: the Gray Catbird. He also notes that it's "found in dense thickets," which would explain why I've never noticed one before now—it likes to hang out where no one can see it, much less someone who wasn't much inclined to spend time staring at brush until she started a photo blog:





Finally, a couple of photos of visuals that caught my eye. In this first one, I liked how these back-lit maple leaves looked against the shadowed trunk:



I can't really put my finger on what struck me about this particular scene—something about the arrangement of the green against the white against the blue: