The Great Egret is a dazzling sight in many a North American wetland. Slightly smaller and more svelte than a Great Blue Heron, these are still large birds with impressive wingspans. They hunt in classic heron fashion, standing immobile or wading through wetlands to capture fish with a deadly jab of their yellow bill. What I'd really like to show is the skeletal and musculature structure of the wing's leading edge. You can see the bone and muscle in this back lit image almost like x-ray. To me the interesting thing is all that you see is a single finger that evolved into the entire wing. Those joints are the joints of a finger. The rest of the hand vanished because it wasn't needed. Some dinosaur raptor evolved into all the birds we know today. The dinosaurs never truly went extinct. They just became birds.

A lady type hummer checking out the blossoms...

An Allen's Hummingbird of the female type...

A Rufous Hummingbird on display

A small white heron of pastures and roadsides, the Cattle Egret is more at home foraging in grass than in water. It follows cattle, horses, and tractors to catch the insects they stir up. Their nests are shallow, bowl-shaped nest of sticks. It is placed in trees and shrubs in colonies with other herons.

Hey, I didn't know this was a cross-species cafe!

A friendly neighborhood bumble trying to horn in on a hummer's meal

Another example of a hummer's grace

A greeting from your friendly neighborhood hummer!

Not much to add to that...

A male Anna's Hummingbird enjoying his bounty

'Nuff said.

A cautious invite from one species to another..

This is a freshly hatched Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis) chick in the nest. The Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis) is a species of heron (family Ardeidae) found in the tropics and subtropics. It is the only member of the monotypic genus Bubulcus, although some authorities regard its two subspecies as full species, the Western Cattle Egret and the Eastern Cattle Egret. @Wikipedia

The Great Egret (Ardea alba), also known as Common Egret, Large Egret or Great White Heron, is a large, widely-distributed egret. Distributed across most of the tropical and warmer temperate regions of the world, in southern Europe it is rather localized. In North America it is more widely distributed, and it is ubiquitous across the Sun Belt of the United States and in the Neotropics. The Old World population is often referred to as the Great White Egret. This species is sometimes confused with the Great White Heron of the Caribbean, which is a white morph of the closely related Great Blue Heron (A. herodias). @Wikipedia

Only birds that do not live in the extreme north and south of their range migrate and do so based on temperature and available sunlight. Anhingas will migrate towards the equator during winter but this range is determined by the amount of sunshine to warm the chilled birds. @Wikipedia On second viewing, I'm wondering if this is a male bird feeding his female partner. She has that typical two-toned look with the tan neck of an adult female. His is the black of an adult male. She's either an adult of so close to fledging, I can't tell. Maybe a better birder could email me.

I believe it's a Common Red Poll

A medium-sized, slender heron of the southeastern United States, the Tricolored Heron was formerly known as the Louisiana Heron. @Cornell Labs