More of the radiant red (pink?) rhododendrons :-).

The photos are really piling up and I sometimes forget to post some I’ve had in the pipeline for days. For the last one of today, here’s a somewhat heavily processed cloud shot from a couple of days ago.

Some experimental macro photography for #MacroMonday (and maybe even #MusicMonday) over on Google+ – I shot this with ISO1600 in low-light conditions just to see if I could filter out the noise.

Now that he doesn’t have to constantly check upon his brood, the blackbird daddy took a relaxing sunbath this afternoon. I looked back at the dates of the photos and it’s entirely possible that the birds were really big enough to leave the nest yesterday – they’ve been in there at least 12 days, perhaps even more. I’m going to put all the images into a gallery soon and I’m also going to sort out some of the great photos I took when I had a blackbird nest right on my balcony back in 2009.

After about a thousand bad photos, I finally managed to catch a magpie in flight.

A greenfinch tweeting its head off on the nearby antenna. Those guys are really loud!

This one was so ready for a closeup :-).

Last night, we had a heavy thunderstorm and we worried about the young blackbirds – but when we looked in the nest, the birds had left! The nest was not destroyed and in good shape, so they must have left sometime early in the morning after it had stopped to rain. We presume they’re still hiding in the bushes on the larger lawn to the left, because there are now several adult blackbirds hopping around there. That was unexpected, we didn’t think that they had grown so much already. But we’re confident that they’re going to make it – it’s a bit colder and wetter now, but there will be lots of food on the juicy lawn.

All dressed up and ready for pollination! :-)

Two beaks and one slightly open eye in this closeup from this afternoon. The other two must be somwhere in there, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to look in the nest because the leaves are growing so much.