End of the holidays

Just as my cold disappears, the weather improves and my toothache is a distant memory..............the holidays end.

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A Bar-tailed Godwit near Oshamanbe today........................

Some late waders............

A Bar-tailed Godwit and a Grey Plover near town this afternoon................

Some more common waders..........

Sunday and Monday were dark overcast days, not good for photography but there were quite a few waders around...........

Back through the typhoon #2

The typhoon earlier this week grounded lots of Whimbrel. Hundreds and hundreds of them...............

Yet another tame wader

A Bar Tailed Godwit at Oshamanbe on Sunday afternoon. It wasn't as tame as the Great Knot below but it's a much bigger bird.........

Again, not much cropping going on as it was easy to get close...........one of the advantages of the fact the beaches are very narrow here and there are no tidal mudflats to speak of either.

Having said that the Spoonbilled Sandpiper near Sapporo was on the only decent sized areas  of mudflat in Hokkaido.

Not much ese around. At Yakumo there was 1 Greenshank, 1 Black Tailed Godwit, 1 Terek Sandpiper and several Common Sandpiper, Great Egret, Osprey and Kingfisher.

It was a bit windy and I was surprised to see a dark shearwater just offshore at Oshamanbe, I guess it was a Sooty Shearwater. The only other waders were the inevitable Red Necked Stints.

I've only seen common species this wader season but that's OK, waders are one of my favourite groups of birds ever since I saw my first local flock on the Ribble at Penwortham thirty years ago.

I went to Kamiiso yesterday. Still hot and humid but at least there was a breeze............

Not many birds though. Not a single Osprey and only 3 species of wader on the section of beach I checked.....

And they were almost all Red Necked Stint, 40 or so of them scattered along the beach.

Several Common Sandpiper and these 2 very wary Terek Sandpiper completed the meagre wader count........

So it's still around 30 and humid outside..........c'mon autumn, hurry up.


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OMG Sunshine

Well well well, we finally got some sunshine this morning and early afternoon (followed by a really heavy thunderstorm though).

We were at Shikabe and I was trying to get some Japanese Green Pigeon shots. BIF shots are tough for such fast flying birds and the 100-400 perhaps isn't the best BIF lens anyway (and of course I'm no expert either). When they fly against the sea it was often impossible to AF but luckily there was a patch of blue sky with the light behind me.

One problem with setting the camera up for BIF shots is when you're suddenly confronted with a bird doing something else your settings are all wrong, I can change them in slightly more than a split second but often that's not enough.

The white background was the surf, there was a big swell after yet another typhoon. The birds had to deal with big waves.......

Next year I'll approach this more seriously and sit near the rocks hidden and camouflaged. Today it was mainly BIF shots...........

Not much else around here, a few Common Sandpiper and Grey Tailed Tattler on the rocks, nothing else.

The day started early in Kamiiso with the last waders of the season (probably).

A Bar Tailed Godwit and a Grey Plover. Other waders included 1 Dunlin, 4 Red Necked Stint and several Common Sandpiper. Lots of Black Headed Gulls around now as well as the first Pintail and Teal of the autumn. There were 3 Heron species; Grey Heron, Black Crowned Night Heron and Little Egret. Actually 1 of the egrets had me thinking of Swinhoes again (bill seemed shorter and yellowish) but it probably wasn't. Here's a lousy heavy crop of 2 egrets, the one on the left seems to have a shorter lighter bill and shorter legs...........or is it just my imagination?

When I went back in the evening there were 3 egrets and they all were clear Little Egrets.

I put an ID request on birdforum anyway, you never know.......

In the ricefields there were lts of Stonechats and hirundines moving south as well as a small flyover flock of Pacific Golden Plover. I was looking for waders here, I flushed a couple of Common Snipe (I could ID them by the white edge to their wings), yet another new bird for my Hakodate list.

Not much in town last week, the weather was terrible most of the time. I did see a few migrants however.

A female Blue and White Flycatcher I think.

The commonest migrant was Asian Brown Flycatcher, they were everywhere. Other stuff included Arctic Warbler, Siberian Stonechat, Grey Wagtail as well as several unidentified thrush type things. Large flocks of Grey Starlings are around as well as the last few Red Cheeked Strarling, here's a male near my apartment.

So it's autumn now, time to get used to wearing socks and jackets again.

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September.........the second half begins

A Bar Tailed Godwit on the beach at Kamiiso today.

We enter the second half of September today and my god the first half was dire, rain almost every day and not much chance to go outside let alone take bird photos.

Today was pretty good though, hot and humid, a little dark but mercifully dry.

There were 5 Godwits together on the beach at Kunnebtsu. 2 Blackwits and 3 Barwits.

The former are common autumn migrants but the latter seem much scarcer, this was the only the second time I'd seen them in the Hakodate area.

Also on the same stretch of beach were 2 Red Necked Stint and 2 Mongolian Plover.

Further along the coast were large numbers of Red Necked Stints (over 100).

Not much mixed in with the Stints, just one Dunlin and another Bar Tailed Godwit.

Not much else around. 1 Great Egret, a few Black Headed Gulls, 10 or so Goosander.

Nearer my apartment there were a few Asian Brown Flycatcher and other unidentifiable small birds flitting about, flocks of Red Cheeked Starlings getting ready to fly south to the tropics for winter and a couple of Night Herons, 1 adult and 1 immature. The latter was easier to photograph.

I'll be in Tomakomai this weekend so I'll probably miss the big footy games on Sunday night (but I'll take a knackered old laptop and try and watch them online). If the weather is good i'll be on another pelagic trip, hopefully to see some Skuas and other stuff.

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Another day on the beach

Another day off and another day on the beach at Kamiiso. I didn't find any rare waders but I did find a very tame Bar Tailed Godwit.

I had a lot of time and it wasn't going anywhere so I took some wobbly handheld video. Apologies for the ropey sound quality.

Bar Tailed Godwit from Stuart Price on Vimeo.

It tended to feed higher up the beach than the Red Necked Stints, that long bill comes in very handy I guess.

Lots of pictures of the same bird but it's not a bird I usually get close to.............

There were 6 species of wader; Greenshank, Grey Tailed Tattler, Whimbrel and of course lots of Red Necked Stints. Again............

Forgive me for posting so many Stint shots, they come and go pretty quickly and are a very photogenic bird indeed.

I was hoping to find something interesting with the Stints. Last week in Hakodate other folk saw Curlew Sandpiper and Red Necked Pharalope with the Stint flocks, today all I could find was Mongolian Plover (these seem very numerous this year).

I stuck around until late afternoon to catch the Godwit in nice light. You can see it catching little worms here............

There were 4 species of Heron around. Grey Heron, Great Egret, Black Crowned Night Heron and this lone Little Egret, another bird I don't often get to photograph up here in Hokkaido.

And the Ospreys are still around.

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I watched the latest 'Robin Hood' movie last night. Wow, talk about dodgy accents and wild historical inaccuracies.................