Dark days

'Dark days' refers to the weather rather than any sinister happenings or mental anguish...............

A Red Flanked Bluetail at the foot of Mt Hakodate this morning. NOT taken with the 100-400 lens which was in my backpack at the time (actually it stayed in my backpack all day). Dashed difficult to get a picture as the bird just refused to stay still. Here's another one that at least shows us it's an aptly named bird.



Other stuff in the forest included Siskin, Japanese White-eye, Long Tailed Rosefinch, 1 or 2 Japanese Accentor (a local tick) as well as the common residents, none of whom wanted to be photographed. On the long walk to the mountain I saw Brent Goose, 5 species of duck including Pochard, Brown Dipper, Little Grebe, Glaucous Winged Gull and hundreds of Common Gull resting before heading south to Honshu. The snow has all gone (temporarily alas) but it was a raw wintry day. I went to the small hide in the forest that overlooks a feeding station (I wanted to get some shots of Woodpeckers with the big lens) but for some reason the folks who organise such things haven't left any food out yet so there weren't actually any birds there.

In the last 2 or 3 days I went to Onuma and the Brent Goose site in Hakodate and took some more predictable shots of the usual species. At least the Nuthatches were striking some different poses. The following shots were with the big lens.






And The Brent Geese were swimming around and trying to feed. I say 'trying' because there was an awful lot of garbage in the sea. I cropped most of the flotsam and jetsam out of these pics.





I tried to get some other shots of some other species the last few days. The 100-400 lens is great of course but it's a little heavy for a walkaround lens (especially dangling around the neck). It also needs reasonably good light which hasn't really been a feature of the last few days. Here's the Japanese race of Great Tit (much shyer in front of the lens than its' congeners). The Long Tailed Tit and Japanese Accentor shots on my PC aren't worth uploading..........



The Marsh Tits were as tame as ever.



And as the picture quality declines here's a White Tailed Eagle flying over Ono on Tuesday.



I'm sure winter will return in the next few days. Not much happening in my life at the moment........November always was a bit of a slow month.

Mourinho for England? Now that would be interesting. If I ever care about football again that is.

Today's gripe about Japan. Potato salad/spaghetti/noodles in sandwiches. Whose insane idea were those fillings? They were my only choices in the nearest supermarket to Mt Hakodate. And they put mayonaise on pizza too.