I got a little behind again, so here are a couple of weeks worth of back yard and local pictures.
Backyard birds
OK, the first one isn’t a bird, but it doesn’t seem to care. Many of our gray squirrels are black, but this one even seems to have a tinge of red in it.

These are the genuine article, blue jays.

There was a strong south wind when I took the next one, enough to ruffle its crest feathers.

It has lots of friends.

These shots are of birds in the thorn bush in our back garden. It is related to the English hawthorn, but has much longer thorns. The flowers are similarly scented and the haws are quite similar too. The end twigs are red for their first year, but the cardinal’s feathers are still not camouflaged.

Below is another pair of red birds, the rosy finches.

The next bird in flight is a dark-eyed junco.

The chickadee below has literally gone ballistic, with wings folded for a second.

The turkeys below only fly when alarmed or when they want to get up into a tree that has berries. It takes them a fair bit of energy to get to tree-top level. In this visit, they stayed on the ground. They were mostly hidden behind a bush from my perspective so just a couple of pictures of this handsome male.

Check out the stylish beard.

Next is a downy woodpecker, taken when the north wind was strong and cold (-14ºC) so it sheltered on the south side of the tree and fluffed up its feathers.

Ice Crystals
Here are a few shots of ice crystals on top of the snow. They are about 1 cm (½”) across.

The next one is deliberately just out of focus to show the colours refracted off the surface (which is white snow – underexposed) so you can see the colours as I saw them through watery eyes (from cold wind). It was even better when they sparkled as I moved.

The next one is on a piece of coloured paper, to get a bit more contrast than the white snow background. The shadow shows the shape well, too.


The next one is a few crystals on top of the seed head of Queen Anne’s lace, which are just as pretty as any diamonds the Queen may have had in her tiara.

Finally, ice in non-crystalline format, as our roof caught a little sun.
