OFF-SEASON OBS - LOCH GARTEN - September 2019-February 2020

Evening, Everyone, Many thanks for all of the pics and posts. Especially love the Cresties, Squirrels and the GSWs.
I'm just catching up after being away from much of the Forum for some time, due to some serious gallivanting, visiting several places and seeing friends and a couple of relatives and doing a bit of birding. Spent three weeks in the USA and came back just over a week into October. Should have recovered from jet lag by now but I still seem to be on some version of US time. Spent nearly 2 weeks in Wisconsin and Illinois (6 hours behind UK time) and another week in Alaska (9 hours behind UK time). Visited the fabulous yearly exhibition of 'Birds in Art' at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin; this year it began in September and runs until early December. This year's chosen Master Artist is from Kent, coloured-pencil artist Alan Woollett! There's a video interview with him somewhere on the museum's website but I cannot find it at the moment but have a look at the links below. Toward the bottom of one of these pages are just a very few of some other items in the exhibit. Should you ever have the chance to travel to any part of the USA's so-called 'Upper Midwest' in the autumn, try to catch this exhibit. Three links: 1. www.lywam.org/.../ (Scroll down to read about Alan and see the photo of him working on a close-up study of a Swan.)
2. Here's a bit more in the press release about him, though much is duplicated with the above link: www.lywam.org/.../
3. Another link about the Exhibition: www.lywam.org/.../
Then our week in Alaska produced several perched Bald Eagles, two gorgeous Golden Eagles soaring high over a cliff edge, three Northwestern Crows being fed by an old codger outside of a small shop, numerous Black-billed Magpies (much like the Magpies here in the UK but a different species), and two types of Jays (several Steller's Jays grabbing peanuts from only a few feet away on the porch of friends of ours, and three Canada/Gray Jays in small trees part way up the wonderfully-named Arctic Valley Road outside of Anchorage, Alaska). To see these two Jays, have a look at Cornell's ID site, here: www.allaboutbirds.org/.../ and here: www.allaboutbirds.org/.../Canada_Jay

Edit:  Apologies for hi-jacking the thread--now back to LG matters!