Death becomes them

Our house has a plethora of windows and a very open floor plan, enjoyable for us, but a condition which can be pretty confusing and dangerous for birds. In fact, I've gotten used to hearing the periodic thud of a flying bird crashing into one of our windows. Usually, the victim recovers almost immediately and flies off to wherever it was going. Sometimes it takes them a few beats to recover, and once, a poor stunned bird took over an hour to regain consciousness and fly away. I've only ever seen one bird die from crashing into one of our windows.

The crash sites can be beautiful to photograph, as in the case of the image below, which I made yesterday.

The wind was blowing pretty forcefully, accounting for the motion blur, and transitory condition of the scene in front of me. Gone now.

For the holidays this year, we enjoyed having a large yellow poinsettia in the house. After a month, though, many of the leaves are drying up and falling to the floor. To me they are as photogenic as the plant itself.

In fact, I'll probably add a few of them to the pile of dead things scattered around my studio space.