Through the years, you’ve told me you’d like to see more of my posts on unexpected beauty. So here’s a bit of unexpected beauty I’ve seen this month.

Winter. It’s cold. The landscape is filled with faded browns and grays. The colors are generally muted and neutral.

As I’ve written before, in the winter I love being able to see the structure of trees, their bare branches silhouetted against the sky. Sometimes, the empty branches will even reveal a bird’s or squirrel’s nest resting among the limbs.

In addition, in these winter months, evergreen trees and plants provide much-welcome texture of needles, waxy leaves, cones, and berries along with a scattering of green along the landscape.

Still, after a while, I start longing for more color and obvious signs of life. I look forward to spring’s awakening and, with it, the beauty of one of my favorite seasons.

Of course, there’s life all around me even in winter. The birds and woodland creatures are hard at work, keeping themselves warm and fed. Most of them blend into the landscape, which is good since hawks, owls, and coyotes live in our neighborhood too.

But there’s one creature that doesn’t blend in—the male cardinal. And for the past few weeks, these birds have been busy around here.

Whenever I glance out the window overlooking our back yard, I often see a dot of brilliant red standing out against the drab gray and brown backdrop. The birds are usually flitting from branch to ground and branch again, zipping all over the yard.

So far, I haven't gotten a good, clear photo of the cardinals. After all, they don’t stay still for long. So the photos above are from Unsplash. It looks as if the photographers were standing on my deck when they captured the images.

On these gray days of January and February, when it’s often cold and rainy and overcast, I am grateful for the unexpected beauty of red cardinals.

Where have you seen or experienced unexpected beauty lately?