Some BIF surprises

It was a beautiful clear spring day in south Hokkaido.....................

The stragglers............

Most of the eagles seem to  have left Yakumo..................and only a few stragglers remain.

A bit of a lull

A bit of a quiet fortnight just passed me by....................

Common birds of March

Yesterday I quickly checked Kamiiso to see if the Black Necked Grebes had come into summer plumage.....................

February begins

A low key start to February in Onuma...................

Christmas in Onuma

We spent christmas with my parents in Onuma.................

The lull before a trip.................

I had time for a short walk this afternoon and the waxwings were around again. They were extremely restless, they were still feeding on the long busy road and it was really icy and slippery underfoot.

Most of the flock were Bohemians but there were a few Japanese Waxwings among them..........

Splattered

We spent most of the day at Onuma. The lake is still 99%  frozen and there was the usual flock of Whooper Swans and Mallards on the one tiny ice free patch. The lone drake Pintail was still there...............it must have stayed the whole winter.

I tried taking some swan pics but they were all crap. There were also a few Smew well out of camera range and a White Tailed Eagle flew over in the afternoon.......

The Nuthatches were as photogenic as ever.

In case you stumbled across this blog and are thinking wow how did he get so close here's your answer.

A couple of Varied Tits put in an appearance but they were not so tame.

Also around were Great, Coal, Long Tailed and Marsh Tits plus Great Spotted and Japanese Pygmy Woodpeckers.

I took a side trip to Sawara. The port had Black Scoter, Goldeneye, Scaup, Harlequin Duck and Black Necked Grebe but nothing was tame and everything stayed out in the middle.

White Tailed Eagle and Peregrine were around but no chances of a photo so we went to a huge seafood processing factory to photograph the gulls and kites.

We only lasted a couple of minutes. What a f**king dump. Hordes of kites, crows and gulls knee deep in rotting fishy offal.

They all took off as I approached and I got covered in birds**t. They totally splattered my down jacket, camera and even my face.

The Nuthatches and Tits are much more civilized.

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Another Christmas in Hokkaido #3

A male Black Woodpecker at Onuma a couple of days ago. It was just before the sun went down, it is always dark or getting dark when I see them..........

The Ural Owl was in the same place..........

The lake is frozen now....only a few tiny patches of open water remain for the wintering wildfpwl......

Whooper Swan and Mallard mainly but there was the lone Pintail........

The tame tits and nuthatches were around too.

Christmas Day was cold and nasty and today (the 26th) is even worse.........I hope the weather relents by the weekend and I can get out and about.

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Quiet week in December

A Nuthatch at Onuma earlier in the week. It is one of the tame ones.

If I'm posting Nuthatch pics then you know it's been a slow week.

Here's a Grey Heron taking a dump over Hakodate.

At Onuma there were White Tailed Eagle,Smew, Whooper Swan, Hawfinch, Grey Headed Woodpecker and a lone Pintail among the Mallards. It was very dark as you can see.

Ar Sawara there were lots of birds in the harbours including a large group of Black Scoter. The light was terrible though.

There were also more eagles here was well as Harlequin Duck, Black Necked Grebe and a lone female White Winged Scoter...................too far away for anything but a crappy heavily cropped record shot (and my first photo of one on this blog).

The usual Gull species were sheltering in the ports from the nasty weather. Here is a miserable looking Glaucous Winged Gull.

In Hakodate in the last week I've seen the usual common winter stuff including Common Buzzard, Great Egret and Brown Dipper.

I seem to have been getting loads of spam comments recently so I'm sorry to say I switched word verification back on........................it's a real pain in the a** I know but I was getting a little tired of deleting comments from people with names like Faizal Mahmood telling me how to earn money online.

Very cold now and a big big dump of snow in Hakodate the last couple of days, I'm hoping to get up to Yakumo over the weekend as the eagle activity starts to enter its 4 or 5 week peak around Christmas time.


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Autumn Geese

A juvenile White Fronted Goose at Tomakomai last weekend.

After the pelagic trip we visited Utonai Ko, a large shallow lake near Chitose airport. It is famous as a resting place for geese in autumn on their way south. There were 2 species: White Fronted and Bean Goose.

99.9% of them were in the middle of the lake.

They feed in the rice stubble in the local padi fields I guess. We see both species near Hakodate but never in great numbers........................

We've been visiting the lake for over 6 years and there is one resident Bean Goose, presumably crippled. It is tame and spends its days with a group of similarly injured Whooper Swans.

Sadly it would call to the birds in the middle of the lake but they ignored it................

In the same area were 2 tame White Fronted Goose, as far as I know these are wild (I've never seen them before so close).....................perhaps they were just mega bold ones?

There was also a small tame flock of Pintail in various stages of moult.

Not much else around. A big flock of swans were on the other side of the lake, there was a lone Great Egret, a few Wigeon, some Little Grebe and Tomakomai's famous Magpies nearby.....................

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