Gold On Gold

Late last week I posted on a planted/managed sunflower field. While I photographed the sunflowers, I saw quite a few different birds come to the sunflower plants for the seeds, so I ended up making 3 additional trips to the sunflower field last week (the sunflowers are now fading away rapidly, so I had to work quickly to capture images with nice looking sunflowers), with my tripod and telephoto lens. One of the most common among these incoming birds was the American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis), which gave a great “gold on gold” appearance! Here are a few of my favorite images I captured of the American Goldfinches, both in and along the edges of the sunflower field.

As I walked the edge of the sunflower field to get a better perspective on all the sunflowers, I ran into a few very cooperative (one even singing to me!) American Goldfinches sitting in small trees that were overlooking the sunflower field:

 

American Goldfinch male perched in a tree overlooking the sunflower field

American Goldfinch male perched in a tree overlooking the sunflower field

 

 

Once I reached my destination, I set up my tripod and camera to capture the goldfinches and their periodic venture into the sunflower field. An occasional female goldfinch would show up:

 

American Goldfinch female perched on a sunflower plant

 

 

But the overwhelming majority of visitors were males:

 

American Goldfinch male perched on a sunflower bloom

American Goldfinch male perched on a sunflower head

American Goldfinch male extracting seeds from the sunflower plant's seedhead

American Goldfinch male extracting seeds from a sunflower seedhead

American Goldfinch male sitting on a sunflower bloom

American Goldfinch male perched on a sunflower head, with sunflower seed in his mouth

 

 

There were also some other bird species that flew in to check out the sunflowers, as well as a small group of mammals. Tomorrow, we’ll look at some other bird species that I photographed in/near the sunflower field.

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