Look!  Up in the sky!  It’s a bird!  It’s a plane!  It’s…well, of course it was a bird…and one I had never seen in my backyard before.

As I stood on my deck this morning, just before the rain’s arrival, I saw a yellow blur of motion from the corner of my eye.  At first I thought it was a male goldfinch, but I was wrong.  It was a Hooded Warbler!  The little fellow landed on my water dish for all of about ten seconds (just long enough for me to snap a blurry photo), took a quick sip, and then darted back to the treetops.

If you look at the picture below of an American Goldfinch, you can see why, from a distance, it would be easy to confuse these two birds.