A brief interlude of nice weather

Another trip up to Yakumo today, lots of eagles and OMG some sunshine at last. Well, sometimes it stopped snowing.

The snow was pretty deep, twice I floundered in snow drifts and my wife had to rescue the camera (I needed 2 hands to pull myself out).

Lots of eagles feeding on salmon but very hard to get a good shot, they just fly away as soon as they catch your eye. Some were in the trees but were obscured by branches.

There were lots of birds like this.........

But they see me and do this...............

So lots of BIFs again, and some even in a blue sky.

This one is uncropped, the immature White tailed Eagles always seem to be the least shy......

This immature Stellers flew right over my head.........

I really wanted some close up shots of birds in the river, I guess for this you need a lot of time and patience and unfortunately we had not enough of the former today. There were some in the trees at least...........

The weather close in again later and some of the BIF shots suffered........

Whilst waiting in vain for some eagles to come back to the salmon carcass I got a crappy record shot of this bird.

A Crested Kingfisher, a bit of a Yakumo specialty and one I often see but this is the first photo i've ever posted of one..........

Other stuff around at Yakumo included Peregrine, Goshawk, Brown Dipper, Japanese Wagtail, Whooper Swan and various common ducks.

At Onuma in the morning not much around bird-wise, here's  Red Fox on the frozen lake.

On the way back we got stuck in a traffic jam caused by an accident, I saw three smashed up cars today in various places. The last one didn't look good, a head on collision with a truck, I hope the driver(s) survived. I didn't see the impact but it was only 100 or so metres ahead of us. The roads were pretty nasty today.

Hope North Korea doesn't let off the nukes, that would be a bad end to the year.

Kim Jong-il, Bin Laden and Gadaffi dead. 2011-the year of the dead power crazed dictator. Oh I forgot to add Steve Jobs to that list.

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