The light today is beautiful. In Tucson they call it cloudy, in the Netherlands we would say it is a sunny day with some thin high clouds. The net result is enough light, and enough dimming from the clouds to get some contrast in the pictures.

This light gave me finally the perfect picture from the male Ruddy Duck (Rosse Stekelstaart), whose colors are very hard to get right. I feel this picture finally does justice to the bird.

The green-winged teal (Amerikaanse wintertaling) is not nearly as hard to get right, but also for this bird the picture is better than last year.

The pied-billed grebe is another species that is very common, but hard to get right. My site has quite a few diverse pictures already, let me add one more here:

Not quite a duck, but ladder-backed woodpecker picture is also interesting because it is made with the 600mm lens with a 1.7 converter on top of it.