Busy day today with appointments, so just a few photos. There was a Black Vulture soaring overhead this afternoon. There are lots of Turkey Vultures around, but I see Black Vultures much less frequently. Turkey Vultures have red heads and light silvery feathers all along the back edge of the wings, while Black Vultures have gray/black heads and their wings are just tipped with silvery feathers.

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I thought I was taking a silhouette of a mockingbird sitting in a bare tree on a cloudy January day.

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But the silhouette didn’t look quite right to me, and there seemed to be some brown showing at the end of the tail.

So I took a much brighter photo (washing out the gray clouds and even some of the tree branches) and saw that this bird was actually a Brown Thrasher.

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This tree looked golden in the light from the setting sun later this afternoon.

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