On Monday, October 5, 2015, I spent a couple of hours in the yard.  We’ve had a lot of American robins and a few European starlings using the watercourse quite frequently over the past few days, and no one loves a bath more than those two species.  While I was in the yard I also observed almost continuous visits from one or more Golden-crowned kinglets, and one finally took the bait and entered the watercourse for a bath.  I probably took in excess of 40 photos… it’s such a cute bird to photograph!  In this case this is a male, which isn’t obvious from the following three photos.

So how do I know the bird is a male?  In this photo the bird is showing its orange crest, a feature it has difficulty hiding if it takes a thorough bath!

And I believe I’ve mentioned in prior posts that we’ve had a male Varied thrush in the yard for a couple of weeks now, and this past weekend it was joined by a female.  They too are attracted by the water and I finally managed some photos of the male.  I hope to obtain better photos as the season progresses.