2018 Best Of #8

Some waders from spring/autumn 2018...................

Waders in the rain.............

Some more waders from near Tomakomai last week...........

2018 late Summer trip #3

 The second day of our short trip was windy but sunny...................

Some more shorebirds..........

Very overcast again, not good for photos. There were a few more shorebirds about at least..............

Another batch of common waders...........

There were quite a few waders on the beach near Yakumo on Monday..................

Waderless

Typhoons, workload and various minor health ailments have kept me off the beaches this August more than I would have liked.................

A rainy Sunday

I have a heavy cold and yesterday was raining all day........................but I mamanged to see a few common waders..................

It was the tail end of a big typhoon that had brought lots of flooding further south.

On this day (September 29th)...........................

September 29th 2011

A Mongolian Plover in Hakodate 3 years ago. Most of my local wader shots are in Kamiiso and this was a surprise find on a beach where I'd never seen any waders before................plus it was quite late for this species in Hokkaido.

2010 and 2011 were both very good years for waders around Hakodate. 2012 and 2013 were nothing special and 2014 has been dreadful...............

A walk to the beach

I had a day off today and this morning the weather was still warm and clear, I decided to walk down the river to the beach instead of taking the train to Kamiiso to catch the last few waders. Actually I thought that there probably wouldn't be any waders around but I was surprised to find this Mongolian Plover on a stretch of beach where I have never seen any shorebirds before. What did I miss today in Kamiiso I wonder?

Not as many migrants as I'd been hoping, here's a Siberian Stonechat from today.

Not much else around the last couple of days. Arctic Warbler, Mallard, Teal, Grey Heron and Kingfisher on the river and several Black Crowned Night Heron, here's a typical view of one from yesterday.

I've been trying to change the look of this blog a little, I want to make it wider and to make the photos larger. If I do that however the pictures and text from previous posts will be too small or out of alignment. Hmmmmm.......maybe I'll just leave it as it is for now.

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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.................