Kauai 2011 day 12: Cardinals

Day 12 was a banner photo day. I took tons of pictures without ever leaving the resort, enough that I'll be spreading the posting of said photos out over a few days here. Today, I decided to start with the photos I took of some Northern Cardinals that spent some time in a palm tree right across from our porch; we were on the second floor, which means I got to take the pics of them pretty much at eye level. To start things off, one of the few shots I got of the male and female together on the palm branch:



The female went to work on a dead portion of a leaf:





Twisting her head right around:





Maybe from a slightly different angle:



There it goes:





At long last, success:





The male posing prettily for me:



And puffing himself up a bit:







As I watched, he decided to do a bit of preening:



Note that you can only see one of his legs in the shot; the other is working on his wing feathers, as I recall:





Getting his wings resettled:







After hopping a few inches along the branch, he went for the full-body feather resettle:









One last beauty shot for the road:



Later on in the day, a Red-crested Cardinal stopped by the porch to snack on some tortilla chips. The lighting wasn't the best, as you can see, but I still liked how these two shots came out:





Finally, this Red-crested Cardinal showed up shortly after a brief rain shower. It's not the best shot in the world, but I loved how its claws are reflected in the rain drops on the porch rail: