Are You a Cardinal?

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You bet your sweet ass I am.

Yeah, there are about six people on the Interweb who will get that joke...

This little guy lives in our back yard somewhere. He's damnably elusive, though, and never stays in one clearly visible place long enough for me to find the camera and get a picture. He was sitting out on one of the pine trees today, chirping away loudly, though, and I managed to get a few decent shots, despite not having the right sort of camera for this kind of thing.

This is probably the best for showing the red color (he was almost directly overhead the whole time, making it difficult to find an angle where he didn't look black. The pointy shape comes out nicely in this one:

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Here ends this week's edition of "Wildlife Photography for Idiots."

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There's one in the park on the way to work who's just like that - elusive as hell. I finally got some good shots of him the other day, after months of trying. And I got a couple of good ones of two males squaring off against each other - in the staring phase. Once they started chasing each other, it was all over.

The reference is Deke Slayton doing Wally Schirra with "are you a turtle today?" on an open mike. It would be severe beer on the house for everybody Mercury absent Wally's proper reply.

We've had a few of them around here; I gather that they bunch up in Winter then split up when the weather gets warmer, so I guess that we'll see rather less now than we have done.

we have one, maybe the same one, every damn year. Sits in a tree and flies into the window. Gets up, flies to the tree, sits there, and flies into the window.

Its how we know its spring.

My favorite Wally Schirra quote "Yabba Dabba Doo", during Apollo 7. Not sure if it was him or Alan Shepard that said
"Good God, just think, this thing was built by the lowest bidder"

Oh, very funny. Very funny.

Perry, that cardinal is doing his best to drive away that very persistent male that lives in a tree on the other side of the window. Males go crazy in spring. Or aren't you on a college campus?

Chad, Photoshop Elements can do miracles with a backlit image like that, even from a low-end camera. Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Shadows/Highlights can lighten the bird and darken the sky independently of each other.

By CCPhysicist (not verified) on 30 Apr 2007 #permalink