Goldfinch Extraordinaire

I was really pleased to day to find yet another ‘indoor’ hide location for taking shots of garden birds. This is in my bedroom and the tree that the birds perch on is an apple tree, situated in my neighbour’s garden but right next to the fence. Due to the layout of our house our bedroom window is much nearer this tree and fence and so my pictures taken with my 400mm equivalent lens set up give me a far better close up of the birds. Although the mist or haar of the last few days has now disappeared, there is still plenty of cloud cover and I was therefore surprised that the light levels were high enough for me to get a much better depth of field ( f8) as the blip of this goldfinch is probably the sharpest shot throughout that I have ever achieved showing the varied and colourful plumage in maximum detail. The final bit of serendipity is the fact that the background to the tree is the off white walls of our neighbour’s house giving me a nice variation from the rust reddy orange fence which usually forms the background to my garden bird shots and allowing a nice neutral background to show off the plumage to its best advantage. Mind you given and few more weeks and the leaves will be out on the tree so I probably will no longer be able to see any birds roosting there. C’est la vie !

I’m not quite sure why the red corona around the beak is broken up by brown and white flecks but this is probably due to the young age of the bird rather than any plumage damage.

Worth seeing LARGE for the detail.