There have been no recent unusual discoveries in the yard, lately.  We continue to have daily visits from a male Varied thrush but it’s very shy and continues to elude me.

However we are having fairly frequent visits from one or more Golden-crowned kinglets which, after breeding at the higher elevations, will be spending the winter with us.  Earlier this week I obtained some nice photos of a male kinglet, which are posted below.  We know this is a male from the orange ‘crown’ in the middle of the yellow crown, as can be seen very faintly in the second photo.

For whatever reason, I find it difficult to get really good photos of chickadees, both in exposure and especially with regard to focus.  I can usually fix the exposure in processing (as I do with most of my photos) but the photos which are not in sharp focus get discarded.  This photo of a Black-capped chickadee looks a little under-exposed but I think it looks better that way.

I had friends today who asked me what the difference was between the Black-capped chickadee and the Chestnut-backed chickadee, so I’m going to take this opportunity to show a couple of photos of the latter.

Here’s a photo of a male Anna’s hummingbird which I trust will be spending the winter with us.

And finally (it seems there’s always a “finally”), a photo of what I am referring to as a leucistic female House sparrow.  This may be pushing the term a little in this case, but I’m on a roll this year!