Fircone Focus

I do like these firs that grow beside Sainsbury's car park on the edge of Dartmouth. I was trying out a setting that I learned about last week at our U3A meeting. It's using iA+ (intelligent auto plus), which gives a little more scope for adjusting the settings to suit the subject, while still being an auto-focus setting. I chose the 'focus on centre' and achieved just what I'd hoped for: focus on the fir cone, with 'depth of field' (I think that's the term) out of focus. It looks as if birds enjoy nibbling at the plant.

Talking of birds, I snapped this one on zoom (see Extra), and it's almost a silhouette, but shows enough detail to see its speckled chest and finch-like beak. I'm wondering if it's a siskin, which (to the best of my knowledge) I've never seen before. What do any visiting twitchers think?

The sky, by the way, has been that colour all day, before and during rain. It's what Radio 2's Sarah Kennedy used to call a milk-of-magnesia sky. Very dreary. (But what can we expect of a bank holiday weekend?!) Roll on proper spring.