Up on the roof

Well, I've found one solution for the tall reed problem: sitting on top of my car. Of course, after 30 minutes or so I had to climb down and walk around so as to not have my hips really pissed off at me later, but it's a start.

From my vantage point, I was able to get a fairly decent angle on this female Red-winged Blackbird as she flitted about in the brush, and even then it's literally the only clear shot I managed:



A turtle climbing up on a little knoll poking up out of the water:



I heard one of the kingfishers long before I saw it, finally picking it up as it flew across the water toward a dead tree on the opposite shore. When I focused in on it with my camera, I realized it not only had a fish in its beak but had landed right next to another kingfisher I hadn't yet noticed:



I kept a close eye on the two birds, figuring that with food involved there was a decent possibility of some interaction. But after sitting together peaceably for a few minutes, the one I'd watched land hopped off and flew to another branch. It was only when I downloaded and checked out my photos that I realized it had apparently handed the fish over to the second bird:



It then attempted to get another fish for itself, but came up from this dive empty-handed. Or, more accurately, empty-beaked:



It then headed back up to sit just below the other bird, which was still holding the fish in its beak:



Looks like it was trying to get a new perspective on the situation here:



And a lucky shot I snagged when it headed back over to the other side:



A couple of shots I took of a male Red-winged Blackbird sitting on the wire above me, as I liked how it looked silhouetted against the sky:





A yellow warbler I spotted during the aforementioned hip-appeasing walk:



A line of geese going by overhead; one of the coolest things about it—namely, the sound of the air moving through their wings—is, of course, the one thing I couldn't capture with my camera:



When I spotted the huge clump of pollen on this bumblebee, I knew I had to try and get a picture of it:



After a few weeks of hearing but never seeing the frogs lurking at the edges of the water, I finally managed to spot one this afternoon:



Finally, some more damselfly photos to close things out:











PS: Apologies for the lateness of this post; my internet connection went out last night while I was working on yesterday's blog entry.