Bird of the Day, theme 'Buttshots'

A line of four mallards had their tails high, producing a synchronized bottoms-up vignette in rippled water. Others treated the brief as a rump portrait: a dark-eyed junco stood on pavement with its gray-and-white back to the camera, and a varied thrush perched in a hawthorn, tail cocked with a red berry. The alternate theme, Colourful Birds, appeared in a painted bunting singing atop a tallow tree.