loxosceles

You're probably familiar with the male red-winged blackbird:


The females aren't as easy to recognize. Most bird books either skip the photo, just mentioning that she's brown, or else show a picture like this:


But I had a lucky day with the camera yesterday, and got a good look at a female who was flying around. She's got red patches on her wings!


Pretty cool. Let's see them together:


I wasn't really there for the birds, though. I was there to take pictures of this:


In spring, you see, a young toad's thoughts turn to love.

Have you ever had a neighbor who had sex really loud? I mean, really really loud? Just be glad they weren't toads. They would have sounded like this.


I didn't get any better shots of the toads than what you see above. I had slightly better luck with the birds. Here's a house sparrow (you can tell it's a female, since it doesn't have a little black beard):


And an OK shot of a robin. Not the first one I saw this spring, but probably the first one I took a picture of.


Just before I ran out of space on my flash card, I got this portrait of a goose. Unlike all the others, this one actually filled the frame! (In the shots above, I didn't resize the images; I just cropped them. Perhaps Santa will bring me a zoom lens next Christmas.)


Not a bad day at the pond.