This American Robin was sitting in the tree outside my kitchen window around 5pm. I ran to get my telephoto to try and capture it before it flew off. It seems huge to me as if it's on steroids.
There are a lot of them around my place. In fact, there's a bush out the front off the deck with the same red berries and sometimes when I open the curtains in the morning, I look out and I see as many as 5 sitting in the bush and they look like those little stuffed birds that people clip onto their Christmas trees.
It reminds me of this story I once wrote when I lived in Salmon Arm. This couple, birders, were visited by this bird called The Siberian Accentor. It's a very small little bird. It's very shy and it runs very quickly trying always to find cover.
It was great fun for me to interview this couple and to gain some insight into the priorities of serious birders who think little of flying around the world at the drop of a hat, or bird dropping, when an unusual one is spotted in an even more unusual location.
I always thought to myself,but if that bird had not landed in the yard of serious birders, nobody would have even known it had flown in as a result of a storm in the Aleutian Islands.