Bird on Cactus

I'm pretty sure the bird is a canyon towhee. The cactus is cane cholla. You might not be able to see it in this photo, but there are starting to be tiny bits of magenta buds on the ends of the cholla. The bird is on an old dried piece of cholla -- it is a kind of wood with lots of holes in it.

One of the fascinating things about photography, for me, is the huge gap between how things look in the real world and how they look in a photograph. In the real world, I love, love, love cholla -- it's endlessly beautiful. But I'm not sure I've ever gotten a good photo of it.