Kauai 2012: Cardinal shots

Sorry—I know it's been a while. After I returned home from Kauai, I was hit with the double whammy of jet lag and illness. Once I finally felt like myself again, I found myself a bit daunted by the number of photos I took, so naturally I dealt with it by procrastinating like my life depended on it.

At any rate, the posting of the rest of the Kauai pics might be a little haphazard; I'll still go through all of the photos for each day and figure out which I like, but I won't knock myself out trying to get all of my faves from a given day into one post.

Today's picks are some closeups I took of a male Northern Cardinal fairly early on in our stay. In general, the birds on Kauai are a lot less skittish around people than the birds around here (possibly because they have no natural predators, save the occasional house cat), and the Cardinals were no exception. I happened to take these particular shots from inside the house, but during our stay they would often come fairly close to us when we were sitting outside on the porch as well.

This first shot is from early in the day, when the light still had a slight golden tone to it:

Such a lucky catch with this shot—because the light was coming from behind the bird, you can see the spray of dust that occurred when he crunched the seed in his beak:

And couple of shots from later in the day; I really liked how the greenery in the background contrasts with the Cardinal's coloring:

This last shot is obviously not of a Cardinal, but as I don't plan on posting any other pics from this particular set I figured I'd include it in this post. As you can see, this dog had absolutely no problem getting comfortable as he waited for his human in the back of this pickup: