Weekly Photo Challenge: Growth

Lately, our back yard has become a bird nursery of sorts. A mockingbird couple built a nest in our lime tree and a mourning dove couple built a nest in the rain gutter on our house, right around the corner from the mockingbirds. This is one of the two baby mockingbirds sitting in one of our rose bushes, two days after they graduated to fledglings.

Little Things

Morning Light

It takes hundreds of pictures to get one like this of these fascinating little winged gems. Fortunately, there are always models out on the feeders who suffer me stalking them with that clicking black box thing with the big eye.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unusual

Hummingbird Swarm

It's not unusual for us, but unusual everywhere else it seems. I don't think I've ever seen so many hummingbirds in one place until we moved to southern California. And this is just one feeder. We have five feeders and there are times when there's five or six birds at each feeder. It's an embarrassment of riches!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Winter

On A Wet Black Bough

The weekly photo challenge for the end of December 2011 is "Winter." This photo was taken last Winter. There is no traditional Winter in southern California or what most people picture when they think of Winter. For us, this is the rainy season, when, unlike much of the rest of the country, everything slowly turns green. There are bleak, gray days made raw by the moisture in the air, but our backyard birds, like this hummingbird, still venture out to find food. I found this one huddling alone in the branches of a virtually leafless, wet mulberry tree.

An Ungraceful Moment

Scratching An Itch

We have many hummingbirds hanging around the back yard even in the winter here in southern California. It's an embarrassment of riches sometimes, with upwards of twenty hummingbirds mobbing the feeders (we have five). I stalk them quite often with my camera and many have gotten used to me. Still, sometimes it takes an ultra zoom lens to capture moments like this.....a  hummingbird in an unguarded, ungraceful moment in between trips to the feeder.