American Redstart

And the parade of small birds outside my window continues. This afternoon, the star of the show was a bird I'd never seen in our yard before: an American Redstart!
 

And here I thought the chickadees and titmouses were hard to photograph... this little redstart (a type of warbler) just did not want to sit still! It was fluttering all over the place, snatching food from the branches of the Red Cedar and moving almost as soon as my camera focused on it. (To be fair, though, the redstart was traveling with a Chestnut-sided Warbler and a Red-eyed Vireo, and those other two birds stayed pretty much entirely hidden in the foliage. So I guess the redstart was fairly obliging, by comparison.)

Male American Redstarts in the spring are dressed in stark black and orange, but even this more subdued individual (a female?) was amazingly brilliant, flashing patches of bright yellow here and there through the leaves:
 

I guess the hunting was good in these trees, because this little bird scoured the branches for quite a while, giving me plenty of views from different angles:
 

You're so pretty, little bird!
 

OK, last picture:
 

I love seeing new visitors in our yard during migration. Keep on coming through, guys!