Here in South Carolina my maple tree won't look like this for another month, but this is a sight I've seen many times in previous autumns - a bright red male cardinal in a yellow maple. The cardinals are often the first birds to show up when I refill the bird feeder.

This picture developed like many of my abstracts, with a fractal design that I played with and manipulated until it didn't bear much resemblence to the original. It this case it was an orange and lavendar pattern that looked rather like a phoenix's wing.