Backyard photos, chilly fall day edition

I haven't posted any photos in a while, so I thought I'd go take some backyard photos of the marsh in the autumn.

We have an amazing number of white-crowned sparrows (updated ID thanks to Mike McDowell--I had "swallow"--what was I thinking?) here today. Here are a pair who let me get about eight feet away.

It's not a great photo, but I love the guy on the left's little expression and his profile. The birds really love that thicket (the one where we found the little Peeper) and I have thought about making a blind for myself and just setting up near it and snapping away. I like the red branches of this big woody-stemmed plant, though I don't know what it is.


Here are some other photos:

This is a sorry state of nasturtium unhappiness, I must say, though one flower refuses to give up! I don't know how he's surviving, but he must be huddling under the dead plants at night or something, because it's been very cold.

I don't know what kind of growth this is on an old stump in the yard. Here's another look at a more colorful specimen:For some reason I thought these were called "bracken" but that's actually a fern. So perhaps it's some form of lichen? I checked a lichen web site, and while I did find this little tidbit about a lichen that's used by golden plovers for nesting material, I didn't find any lichens that looked like this.

I saw a few ducks flying around over the marsh, their winter home.

It's hard to see but there's a duck flying above my head here (the black speck). I called this photo "lone duck sky" which sounds like a strange combination of an Asian and a Native American name. Perhaps I should make a sequel to Dances with Wolves?

Egg Hill, resplendent in its fall outfit

Here's some evidence of a woodpecker on this new suet cake I'm trying:
It's some sort of "red hot pepper" flavor, which according to the package was supposed to drive woodpeckers wild or something, but I haven't actually seen any birds on it yet. Still--someone's been pecking.

Now that's a lot of box elder bugs.

Here's a photo of the art studio/crazy uncle house/office/cottage I've been working on:

It used to look like this:
This is a view from another angle, but I had to show you the hideous faux brick tar-paper-siding stuff that used to be on it. We stripped that off, and later I was told by a friend that this siding had asbestos in it--uh oh. I guess it's too late to worry about that now. . . . At any rate, we've been redoing the windows and everything, just trying to make it look better than the eyesore it once was, and more like a little cottage or studio.

By this point, I was really getting cold, so I came inside to find Niblet doing a little reading:

He really loves his subscription to Vanity Fair. But then I've always suspected that he's one of those liberal weirdos who can't get enough of that Hollywood gossip.

(bunny experts: that glossy paper isn't bad for him, is it? He really loves it!)

"Hey, I haven't read that issue yet! Did you eat
the cover photo of that dreamy George Clooney?! Gees!"