Faces of Fall

As I have noted before once we get into late fall I am extremely limited in what I can photograph at my bird feeders.Today I decided to challenge myself to see if I could photograph all of the species of regular visitors to my feeders.I went out into the backyard,restocked the bird feeders and climbed into the photoblind and waited. There must have been a hawk up in the trees because there was absolutely nothing coming into the bird feeders. After about a half an hour I was surpized to see a Chipmink as the first victim er creature to come out and want to be photographed. Next and probably the easiest on my list were the Dark eyed Junco and a Steller's Jay.They were easy because there were so many of them. After that I worked on the most difficult image of all the Red Breasted Nuthatch. Because it was dark and cloudy out I was forced to use a pretty slow shutter speed and nuthatches pretty much never stop moving. I solved it by looking for a place they always landed and prefocused on that spot and just waited. I had tons of blurry nuthatch images by the time I was done!But I got a nice nuthatch image for all of my patience. After that I photographed an image of a Chestnut Backed Chickadee. I thought the squirrels were going to be the easiest today because yesterday they were all over the place. Today I waited and waited and finally a Western Gray Squiirel and a couple of Douglas Tree Squirrels came at the very end when it was starting to rain.It was a fun little personal challenge and i hope you like the images. My favorite image of course was the Douglas tree Squirrel. They are so darn cute. God's love and blessings, chris