Little bird in a big world

One of the tiny Common Redpolls that friends, Dorothy and Stephen, and I saw when we went for a drive east of the city on 7 December 2012. The main thing we were searching for was a Snowy Owl. Before we saw our first Snowy of this winter, we saw several flocks of Snow Buntings and Common Redpolls. They were flying at top speed over the fields and backroads, but we were lucky a couple of times when some of them landed on the snow-covered stubble near the edge of the road or on a barbed-wire fence. You can barely see the deep red "dot" on this female's forehead, but in better light, it looks so pretty. Ha, she looks like she really didn't want her photo taken!