Winter quickly retreats..............

A male Pochard in the local park. A rather quiet week, and after the freezing cold of a few days ago it's been very warm. So much for winter kicking in............

The Pochard wasn't the only waterbird in the park..............

The tame Temincks Cormorant was still around, as were 3 Coot and 2 Little Grebe.

I've had it confirmed that the Cormorants I've been seeing at Onuma the last few summers are a different species from the one above (they are Great Cormorants, the same as in the UK) so my Hokkaido list went up by 1.............

Here's a minor ID quandry that could raise my Hakodate list by 1. This is a duck from last week, is it a female Falcated Duck? It was about the same size as the Coots and looks too brown for a Pintail. Any opinions welcomed........

To complete the duck theme here are a couple of startled looking Goldeneye on the local river........

City Hall have deemed it necessary to chop down lots of trees by the river near my flat. Why? They were in an an inaccessible place (you need a ladder to get down there) and couldn't possibly be doing any harm. I suspect there is a tree-cutting department at City Hall that was using up some of its budget. Naturally they didn't bother picking up any of the litter round and about. Tyres, rice-cookers, discarded underwear, beer cans in their dozens and plastic bottles in their hundreds. Now we jut have trash and tree stumps where there used to be trees full of birds. Nice one Hakodate.

I went to Mt Hakodate on Friday to try and find the Black Woodpecker I'd heard a couple of weeks ago. I couldn't find it although there were a few interesting things in the forest such as Long Tailed Rosefinch and and Red Flanked Bluetail. Today we went up to Yakumo intending to photograph the eagles but they haven't arrived yet, too warm perhaps? There were a couple of White Tailed Eagles though (and we saw one later at Onuma too) and I guess we were a tad early. Our next visit up there will be in a couple of weeks when hopefully they'll have arrived and will be feasting on some of the many recently deceased Salmon we saw in the river today.........

At the river mouth there were hundreds of Kittiwakes.

I met some students from Hokkaido University (a couple of them have blogs linked on the right) and had a chat as we watched the Kittiwakes going about their business.

I went machine gun crazy with the fast continuous shooting on the 7D and before I knew it I'd nearly filled up my 16GB memory card (!).....................and most of the shots weren't even any good, white birds against a grey sky..................I will be more restrained next time.

Liverpool? Meh.

I watched 'Terminator Salvation' and 'In the Loop' last week. I don't need to see the former again but the latter was pretty funny at least...........