The hunt was on. The Red Tailed Hawks and Pileated Woodpeckers were somewhere out there waiting for me to capture … on film. I got the former. A friend got the latter.

And I had a category here entitled, appropriately enough, Red Tailed Hawks and Pileated Woodpeckers. I liked the name. Sounded good. It said what I wanted.

One problem.

In the World of WordPress … over there on the left where there are drop downs for Categories and whatnot … a long name like Red Tailed Hawks and Pileated Woodpeckers caused the drop down box to spread out into my daily blog entries.

Very un-blog-like.

So I have now chosen to rename it to Beautiful Birds. Still includes the Red Tailed Hawks and Pileated Woodpeckers blog entries … but it now can include all bird type posts. Like The Stupidest Bird Ever.

And this one.

Not many things in nature inspire like the vision of a large winged creature taking flight effortlessly. So many of these birds also are beautifully colored as well.

I have come across a whole batch of beautiful colorful and exotic bird pictures … and I’d like to share them with you here.

The image that springs to mind might be one like this painting of the mythical Phoenix … thinking that the real birds in flight could not be as majestic. This would be wrong.

An acquaintance of mine, Laura, captured this magnificent creature … a Heron if I am not mistaken … in graceful flight. My friend Carla takes many incredible pictures at Canoe Creek State Park including this one. It’s funny, but I guess I never thought about what a parrot would look like in full flight until I saw this picture. Stunning.And no, I never thought about or saw a picture of a peacock flying … not from the front or, like this photo, from the back.

Yes, I know. It’s a snake. But for a snake it’s very colorful, no? OK. Back to the pictures of the birds in flight.I don’t know what kind of birds these are. The eyes are pretty amazing. It came from a Facebook page entitled something like 1,000,000 Birds or something.

These Cattle Egrets were captured by my brother on his recent safari to Africa.  I had forgotten exactly why they were called Cattle Egrets but it turns out it has to do with them hanging out at the feet of grazing cattle except when it rides on their backs to pick at ticks. Charming.This is a picture of a Osprey with a brown trout taken at Canoe Creek by a man named Patrick McElwee. A stunning picture of nature at its best.  Another picture by Carla of a Blue Heron making a speedy escape after being startled.

You know, even though this is a great picture of a Blue Jay, I still do not particularly care for these birds. They are loud, noisy, abrasive, bullying … did I mention I don’t like them much?

No I don’t recall where I got this picture. I saved it on my desktop because I liked the sentiment. I’d like to think it is a dove of some sort.

In the eyes of hope, even a pigeon can become a dove.