A bit of whimsy

As I sat eating my breakfast this morning, I was pleased to see that a new type of bird has discovered my feeder: Purple Finches. I already thought their coloring was pretty striking, but seeing one up close kinda blew me away:





When I got out of work this evening, I decided it was cool enough outside that visiting Whimsy Pond for a bit was a viable option—I draw the line at temperatures that make me break out in a sweat while standing still. The waterfowl seemed to prefer it that way as well, as shortly after I arrived a pair of herons flew by over the pond:



I know you can't see much of them in this, but I liked the way they looked against the clouds:



I also spotted a quartet of birds floating along; I took a few photos so I could zoom in for a closer look, and discovered they were Common Mergansers—although even with the photos it's hard to tell if they're all females or a mix of females and juveniles. I chose these three images to post not because there's anything particularly noteworthy happening, but because I thought it was interesting how different their coloring could look depending on both the amount of sunlight and how that light was reflecting off the water.







The Kingfishers were actually rather quiet this time around, but I did manage to get a pretty decent shot of one as it flew past me—in fact, it was the only shot in the sequence that wasn't just a blue blur:



A heron that went past directly over my head:



There were some dark clouds rolling along the horizon during most of my time at the pond, and at times the wind blew through at a pretty good clip. During one of those moments, I noticed that at times the wind bent the cattails so much they were almost parallel to the ripples it was also creating in the pond. Naturally I tried to get a photo of it happening, and I think this one came the closest:



Finally, a shot of the opposite shoreline as the wind went through, turning over the leaves on the trees—I thought the effect was rather pretty: