Another snowy morning

Just a couple of photos I took Monday morning, after an overnight snowfall:

Snow print

Just one pic today, taken when I was home with Kaylee at lunch. I have no idea what kind of bird left it, but I thought it was pretty cool:

Winter morning

I'm still plugging along on the vacation pic front, but not even close to having a post ready to go. So I thought I'd share a few pics I took with my phone this morning; fresh snow and a clear morning worked in my favor, photo-wise.

This one was taken down where I wait for Kaylee to return from her walk with her buddy Robby and Robby's person Colin; you can see fresh deer tracks along the edge of the brush:

A look at the eastern face of Mount Equinox, lit up by the rising sun:

And from a slightly different perspective, with the blue spruce in the foreground:

Catchall

The last two full days of my vacation were both very, very busy photo days—too many to go through in the time I have after work. So I'll keep plugging away at that task, but in the meantime I thought I'd post a few pics I've taken in recent days; most have already been shared on Facebook and Instagram, but I figured I'd post them here as well.

A couple of Kaylee shots to start things off:

Yesterday's sunrise:

And a look at this evening's snowfall:

Another snow day

As was the case for most of the eastern half of the country, we woke up to a very snowy landscape on Wednesday—and it didn't look like it'd be letting up anytime soon. So we had a day off from work, which meant I had a chance to do some birdwatching.

First up, just to give you a sense of how much snow we'd gotten overnight, a shot of what my feeder looked like first thing in the morning:



A Titmouse that picked through the snow to snag a bite to eat:



This was the first Junco I've ever seen on my feeder:





A few Chickadee pictures:





I would think this tided the Chickadee over for a little while, at least:



A lucky catch of this Chickadee doing a taste test:



Think this Titmouse was trying to catch some snowflakes on its tongue?



This White-breasted Nuthatch got two for the price of one, as that bit of yellow is a piece of corn frozen onto the peanut:



Finally, a photo I took on Thursday morning; I heard a Cardinal when I walked out of the post office, and after a quick scan of the nearby trees spotted it up in some branches:

Sunday visit

I stopped over at Mom and Dad's on Sunday to hand out with Kaylee for a while, as my folks had traveled north for the day to visit some of our family. I brought my camera along, and now that I've finally gone through all the photos I took I figured I'd post a few of them here.

A dead tree that I thought looked particularly striking against the snow:



A couple of shots I took when the flurries were in particularly high gear:





There were still a few Redpolls hanging around. And by "a few" I mean "enough to have their own Hitchcock movie":







And a closer look at the Redpolls swarming the two seed feeders:



Evidence that I took this picture during a very strong gust of wind?

1. The streaks of snow show that it was moving sideways.
2. The side of the feeder that this Hairy Woodpecker is clinging to is, as you can see in the previous photo, usually perpendicular to the house, not parallel to it:



A male Cardinal that joined the woodpecker on the feeder:



The two birds weathering both snow and Redpoll flurries:



A couple of shots of the male Cardinal in the blue spruce:





And I managed to spot the female Cardinal tucked into the spruce as well:





Finally, a couple of Kaylee shots I took as she made our walk safe from fallen branches...



...and dealt with any suspicious-looking bark as well. After all, one can never be too careful, right?

The golden hour

This morning I decided that it just didn't feel right to close out the year without one more visit to Whimsy Pond. We were enjoying another sunny day here, so I waited until about an hour before sunset to head over.

Once I got there and found a spot to park, I started walking along the road, examining the landscape and trying to figure out what I wanted to photograph. I heard a lone bird calling, and after a moment spotted it sitting up on a power line. When I got a closer look at the bird through my telephoto lens, I realized it wasn't one I immediately recognized. So I took a few photos in hopes of identifying it when I got home. It was on my second pass through my bird guide that I finally was able to put a name to the face: it was a female European Starling, sporting her winter plumage. Because I got very lucky with this particular image, despite the distance you can see some of the white speckles in her otherwise dark plumage—a visual that, according to my book, is the reason why they're called Starlings in the first place:



When the Starling departed a few minutes later, I turned my attention back to my surroundings. The pond itself was iced over and covered with snow, so instead I looked to the terrain on the other side of the road for things to photograph:



It took a bit of fiddling with my camera settings, but I finally managed to get a few shots that captured what I was seeing where the sunlight reflected off the snow. This time around the shadows aren't caused by trees or anything else out of frame, but by wind-carved ridges on the surface of the snow itself:





A light flare that I thought actually enhanced the image rather than detracted from it:



The last remnants of a milkweed pod backlit by the setting sun:



Finally, I just really liked the lighting in this shot:

Snow and shadows

I woke up to sunshine and blue skies this morning, which actually came as a bit of a shock—it's been so long since we've had a truly clear day, I'd almost forgotten that the sky comes in colors other than shades of gray.

Naturally, I couldn't resist photographing my neighbor's barn against the new backdrop, especially since it still has such picturesque snow piled on the roof:



I fully intended to stay away from bird pics today, but while I was working on a Sudoku this morning I happened to glance up in time to see an unfamiliar bird on my feeder. So I grabbed my camera and managed to take a few photos of it before it flew off; when I consulted my bird book, I discovered I'd played host to a Carolina Wren:



Finally, our sunny day meant I got to take photos of various shadows against the unbroken snow, which I find sometimes make for a more interesting than the objects themselves: