Trees

Some of the trees looked pretty awesome standing cold and forlorn looking at the ice's edge —

Santa Fe Birds

Was in Santa Fe last week and where i was staying had three bird feeders hanging and they were heavily used. So i sat out back with my camera and big lens and took a few photos of them.

Western bluebirds which are quite different from the Northern Bluebirds around here:

The Western Bluebirds resemble swallows, a little bit, particularly the male above. That is a couple above with the female on the right and the male on the left - they were around the suet (which is what they are eating) everyday.

Quail ... rather different looking from the ones that lived at GGF which had the strange looking topknot. I wasn't very happy with the image but it was the best shot. The is: The scaled quail (Callipepla squamata), also commonly called blue quail or cottontop

from Wikipedia. Cottontop seems most appropiate.

Curve-Billed Thrasher ... a rather intense looking bird which did not hang about as the other birds did and i was lucky to get this shot.

And one of my favorite birds whose name i have to look up ... 

White Crown Sparrow, i think.

Behind ...

Am feeling behind on a variety of photographic fronts: haven't posted last week's gallery and haven't been spending an hour or so per day on reorganizing the files - without which the whole change over from date to category is fairly useless. Sigh, can't tell if it is a time issue or i'm just lazy - probably some of both.

We have an Amaryllis blooming and i've, again, trying to capture some of its bloomin' center. Here's the first effort:

It came out pretty (click on it to see it in large form) but the stamen and pistil could be sharper so i'm gonna tackle that shortly. This is a 40 photo image.

In the backyard, there are more moving critters (which i love seeing) and the first below has taken me a variety of shooting to capture. It is very shy and runs aways at the slightest noise:

A groundhog. There are a lot of them in Asheville. In the top image you see its paws just below its chin. It ate constantly and always seemed to have its mouth full. It was eating a particular plant, sorta a weed with purple flowers, not clover; at least not the clover plant that has been identified to me as clover. Will look up the plant he is eating.

Birds

Birds are passing thru on the way north now ... while most of these can be local, the Cedar Waxwings are clearly moving north. These are the first i've seen in NC.

And this showed up yesterday and while native to this area, i rarely see Flickers here. This is a female Northern Flicker, yellow shafted which you can see in the second photograph.

These are always here and are so large they are easily confused with Ravens, however, they are Crows: These are amazingly large birds!