This is what I saw the morning after I got back from Barcelona: the front yard oak had turned orange and the Caddo maple had acquired a little orange as well.	Though most of the big-tooth maple turned a luminous gold with just touches of orange, one branch turned an incredible glowing red.
When birds pose in full sun, it's much easier to photograph them. This female goldfinch--probably a lesser goldfinch though from this angle I'm not sure--gave me time to take several pictures.	Every winter we get a northern flicker for several months; if there's water in the creek, it rarely comes up to the dry woods, but if the creek is dry, it comes for water to Fox Pavilion. It is shyer than the small birds, approaching cautiously and spooking at any movement. I was lucky to get a picture of it this year, though it was in such deep shade that I had to do quite a bit to the image to make it visible...that was before I got the f4 lens.
The new f4 lens is allowing me to use faster shutter speeds, and thus capture crisp images of flighty birds like this myrtle warbler. These little birds are constantly on the move. In sunlight, like this, they can seem brownish-gray on the back, but in shadow they look a businesslike gray.	Here, in the shadow of the Ashe juniper, the slower zoom lens would have given me a dark underexposed blur...and I have the dark underexposed blurs to prove it. But the faster lens gave me images that needed just a tiny tweak to give this.
This bird was busily picking insects off the twigs--but moving around so fast that those shots were blurry. Here it finally held still in a bit of dappled sunlight. From the markings, this is a male still in breeding plumage--you can just see a little yellow on the crown of his head. There are two of these warblers hanging out near Fox Pavilion right now; the other is browner, with a beige throat, and probably a female. So far the pictures of her aren't as good.
Not the same bird as in the pictures last week--the bill is shorter and "thicker".	Here he is cracking a sunflower seed he carried up here from the ground.
Continuing the theme of red...here's what a young red oak in the back yard looks like. I hope to get viable acorns from this one and grow more of these. The yard oaks come in all shades from rich gold through copper and orange to this particular red, which is my favorite--though I enjoy the combinations as well.	A close up of the leaves of another red oak in the yard, the one nearest the lily pond. Texas gets its fall color later, because of the longer growing season, and the red oaks are the last to turn, often not in full color until December.
Two of these birds are just alike; one of these birds is not like the others...	"I beg your pardon...to WHOM were you speaking?"

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