Feathered

There were no bugs today; it was too cold. But I spent a little time in the backyard, and there was a curious incident.

As I mentioned a while ago, I got a new camera for Christmas, a pair of binoculars with a camera in them, and I am still trying to figure out how to get decent pictures out of it. It's harder than it sounds. Anyway, there were a lot of birds in the backyard today, so I thought it would be a good time to go out and try to get pictures, since taking pictures with the binocular camera through my dirty windows doesn't work very well. The birds were uncooperative, though, mostly flying away when I came anywhere near, and the  late afternoon sunshine muted by a thin layer of clouds wasn't really bright enough for good pictures, but some chickadees landed in a tree near me, so I tried to take their picture.

I forgot to change the focus setting on the camera (it has two settings, near and far), so the pictures didn't come out so well:

Nice action, though.

So, while I was taking pictures of the chickadees, I heard a woodpecker tapping on a tree behind me, and I turned around to try to get a picture of that.
Those pictures didn't come out at all:

Sigh... So dreary.

 Anyway, while I was taking pictures of the woodpeckers (it turns out there were two of them), one of the chickadees flew away. And how did I know that with my back turned? Because it flew so close behind me that its wing brushed the back of my neck. I have NO idea why it did that. I can come up with some anthropomorphized answers: it resented the fact that I turned away from it to take pictures of the woodpeckers (though if that is the case, it should have been more cooperative in the first place), it did it because it was dared to by the other chickadee, it did it because it thought it would be funny to tease the 'birdwatcher' that way. Maybe it was an act of aggression, a warning? I really don't know. I can think of no reasonable explanation why a wild animal would brush up against a human on purpose, but I also can't think of a reason why it would have happened accidentally. But there it is - today I had a close encounter of the third kind with a chickadee.

Life is so full of mysteries...