Cold Cardinal

I took this picture a week ago and put it up on my main blog. I looked it over today and decided I liked it enough to post it here as well. You really need to click on it to see it larger to appreciate how miserable the poor cardinal is. Birds in the south, assuming they're not migratory, just don't appreciate snow very much. I completely understand their point of view!

This bird is bad!

Lee gave my birds some Christmas presents under the slender pretence of giving them to me. Ha! We all know she likes birds better than people.

But the gift backfired.

According to Lee, my Wal-mart birdfood is nasty and this high grade stuff she gave me would attract "better birds"--no sense of egalitarianism there, huh? Instead all I have is a very territorial mockingbird that grazes in the new feeder and won't let all my other birds eat at the old feeders. Bad bird!

Snow and Cardinals

She looks so concerned and vigilant whereas hubby, there below, just looks like a greedy pig.

To be fair, maybe they just have different ways of dealing with the snow and cold. I must admit--and maybe it's the male in me--that I also would rather go for the muffin than the bird seed.

Light Snow

At the risk of offending people with a good sense of humor, I'm titling this picture "Light Snow".

This past Saturday we received a couple of inches of snow in the Piedmont area of NC. Today most of it's gone due to two days blessed with lots of sunshine albeit unseasonably cold temperatures. It's 26f now at 7:40pm. Brrrr. But last night it dropped to 10f which for this area is very, very cold.

snow dunking

We had some snow here in NC this weekend and it had horrible affects on some of the locals. Here you can see a Dark-eyed Junco bobbing for seeds in a snow covered dish. 12 miles away in Chapel Hill the Tarheels, despite having a 18-0 record, lost to the unranked Maryland team. It had to be that damn snow.

Pudgy Cardinal

Apparently I'm a food enabler. Shame on me!

Bird in Tree at Dawn

Waterfall

My Dad and I hiked into this waterfall a few days after Christmas last month. It was quite beautiful--and surprisingly full of water considering the drought here in the Southeast. Of course there had been a fair amount of rain that week in upstate SC. It always seems to rain there when I visit, drought or not.

red dawn

These pictures were taken Thursday morning. About 20 minutes apart. In the picture above the sun hadn't quite risen over the horizon yet and there was still a strong shift towards the long wavelength end of the spectrum. By 7:50am, below, the sun was just rising over the tree line in the background and much of the red was chased out of the sky.

It was a pretty dawn but by 9am it was raining and the clouds never left all day long.

Misty Morning

I couldn't sleep so I was up to take pictures in the pre-dawn light. It was pretty this morning, I think it was Monday, but the next day was even prettier. More on that later...

Red Breasts