Friday Foto Friends~Lost and Found!

 Good Morning my Friday Foto Friends! 

First of all, again I want to thank all of you again for your thoughtful words of encouragement and prayers for me this past week as I endured that procedure on my neck .  I am feeling so much better and am so very thankful for how well the epidural has helped me to get some movement back into my neck without so much pain. I will be going back to physical therapy this morning and trusting I will be able to do so much more now without so much resistance! Praise God for healing grace and modern medicine!

Last week, if you read my post over at The Adventures of Lily Grace about the baby bluebirds leaving the nest, you will recall that Lily reported that we watched altogether four baby bluebirds leaving the nest. It was quite an exciting event...and in all the excitement of course I was taking pictures left and right. However at one point I had become so excited with checking my pictures on the computer and then having more action going on outside that I forgot to put the memory card back in my camera and as I was taking pictures of the last birds leaving the birdhouse, I realized too late they were not being recorded on the memory card, but in the "internal memory" of my camera.  This is an older model Kodak "EasyShare Z650" camera, which I love...but I never had the attachment to retrieve the pictures from the internal memory...a special cord that attaches to the camera and to the computer, and so those pictures were now stuck inside the camera with no way to send them to the computer! I could see them on the little "review" screen on the camera, and there were some very good pictures there, which I very much wanted to be able to share with you! And so, I had to do some googling and find the attachment I needed on Amazon.com, and thankfully it was available and not terribly expensive, and so I ordered it! So I have told you all of this so that you will fully appreciate the trouble I have gone to in order to share these photos with you today!!!

And so, drum roll, drum roll, without further adieu, here are the missing baby bluebird pictures:

This was actually the fourth baby to emerge from the birdhouse.  We did not realized there was a fourth bird still inside! We were so busy watching the others as they flew up into the trees to meet their parents that we had turned our backs on the birdhouse for a while. So you can imagine my surprise and delight when I looked again and saw this timid youngster, hanging on to that ledge with his right foot, wondering whether or not he should let go or not...

And THIS is the best picture of all! Somehow he turned himself around and flapped his beautiful blue wings for us to see, still holding on to the ledge, not quite sure of himself enough yet to let go...

He held on for another few seconds, and then, finally getting up his courage, he flew over to the deck railing and sat there for a few minutes to catch his breath and get up the courage to finally fly up to the trees...

He looked up at me (I was inside the house looking through the window), and I guess seeing me there made him realize he'd better get a move on and find his family before the funny looking lady with the silver camera got any closer...

I took this picture of the mother or father bluebird up in the tree, (bird on the lower left) calling to him.  I didn't realize until I finally was able to enlarge this photo on the computer that there was a Brown Thrasher sitting there, on the right, very close to the Bluebird!  I don't know if he would have hurt the baby bluebird, but I am sure Mama or Papa Bluebird were ready to fight for their baby no matter what!

And so that was the end of the Baby Bluebird photos on my "internal memory".  But there were a few other pictures that had been trapped inside my camera for some time that I was happy to finally "set free".  I figured you might enjoy seeing them as well, so here goes the remainder of my "trapped photos":

Last winter you might recall that we had a huge flock of Robins and Cedar Waxwings fly in and literally strip our holly tree of all of its red berries within the space of a few days.  Even though I posted many pictures from that event, apparently there were a few that I missed, again due to my overzealousness in taking pictures without remembering to put the memory card back inside my camera.  So here's a few of a Robin, having his breakfast, taken last November:

Our holly tree is once again loaded with berries, but they are still green. I expect we will have another rush of birds again later this year to look forward to!

And these last few pictures are the rest of what was hidden on my camera. Nothing too exotic or surprising, but we might as well get them out there and look at them, right?

One of our favorite Canada Geese, sometime this past winter or spring...

And my attempt to take a picture of a goose flying across Still Waters Pond. I like the golden ribbon effect from the motion of the wings in flight...do you see it?

Here is a picture of one of our lovely water lilies, which I had pulled up from the pond when I was out kayaking last year. I miss paddling around the pond in the kayak...maybe now that my neck is not quite so bad I might dare to venture out again one of these days...maybe when it cools down a bit...we'll see...that's a good goal for me to work  towards...

And if you look closely, you can see the female and male Wood Ducks swimming on the pond. I am always happy when I can get a picture of them because they mostly stay on the other side of the pond and if they detect my movement at all they take off and fly, so it is very hard to get a decent picture of them. 

Okay, that's all that was on there! But the good thing is, now that I have this attachment, it doesn't matter if I forget to put the memory card in or not!! Yay! Anything to help my feeble memory these days is a good thing!

Okay, so tomorrow is going to be a great day, as I am going to meet our blogging friends Barbara from Sweet Tea and Sandals and Terri from Your Friend From Florida for lunch over in the little town of Micanopy.    We are all very excited to be able to get together again. I have met both Barbara and Terri in the past, but never all together. So you can expect to be seeing lots of pictures from this little adventure from all three of us, I am certain!  It would be wonderful if sometime more of us bloggers could plan to meet together! Wouldn't that be a "hoot"?  

It might make history!

Have a blessed and wonderful weekend, my friends.