Seven

All the regular 7 winter gull species were at Kamiiso today.....................

Some more early April birds.........

We were out west on Monday.................

A bit of spring in the air..........

A hint of spring at last...............

Another grey Sunday

Some Rooks just outside town this afternoon. A crappy picture but there was almost nothing to photograph today. Another grotty day...........all my days off seem to be blighted by nasty weather recently.

Not much around anywhere. Onuma was very quiet although 2 White-tailed Eagles were there: presumably the same pair that overwinter there every year. At Kamiiso the usual ducks and gulls were around but not much else...............

Miscellaneous late March birds............

Some more shots from Friday...........................

A night in Yakumo #1

We spent Sunday night in Yakumo.......................

European Starling

A new bird for my Japan list..............

Another grey Sunday

A quiet Sunday here in south Hokkaido, tight finances meant we didn't want to spend a lot so we just stuck around town.

The above Whooper Swans were sitting in a snowfield in Ono. Actually it is a paddyfield, in a 6 or so weeks the farmers will be ploughing it and preparing for planting. I noticed the first Skylarks of the year in the same place and there was also a small flock of Rook.

This is amazingly difficult to photograph, they are so wary compared to the resident crow species. It is actually a fairly scarce winter visitor but as I grew up seeing loads of them in England I tend not to bother photographing them much, this BIF was the best one I could get today.

Nothing at Kamiiso apart from the common winter seaducks so I ended up in the bay area, the light was terrible. Lots more common winter water birds here. These are 2 of the more interesting ones, a Pelagic Cormorant and Red Necked Grebe.

So Liverpool's season becomes more embarrassing every fixture (Wigan?!?!).

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2012 begins........

A quiet lazy start to 2012 saw us in Kamiiso first up. I couldn't find the Shorelark, maybe it's gone. There were a few birds in the port though, not as many Black Necked Grebes as last time.

This Black Scoter caught something tasty looking..........

Not much else around so we headed to Onuma, the Ural Owl was showing nicely if a little sleepily.

The Nuthatches now have a snowy background instead of an autumnal one........

Not a vintage New Years Day for photos. It was a dark grey day as you can see. On the way back home in the late afternoon we stopped to check out a large flock of Rooks in Ono. Growing up in England it's difficult to get excited about Rooks but over here they are a little rare. I've never really tried to photograph crows before, I had no idea it was so hard. Black birds on a dark day are not a great idea and this species os unbelievably shy here too. This was the best I could manage and it isn't very good. Soft and blurry but at least it was striking a nice pose.

In the flock there were 3 Daurian Jackdaw, another bird I find difficult to photograph. I never see them on the ground, always against grey skies and I only ever shoot them through the car window on busy roads on freezing cold days.

This is the fifth anniversary of this blog, I started on January 1st 2007. I also went to Onuma that day...........

Before that I had another blog on surfirds which ran all the way through 2006.

5 years, the time has flashed by........

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Lots of good stuff to end the month........

Two of today's star birds, a drake Long Tailed Duck at Oshamanbe and a Mountain Hawk Eagle tucking into some salmon at Yakumo.

The latter is a scarce bird in Hokkaido and is only the second one I've ever seen. It has very thick powerful talons and it looks like it doesn't take s**t from anyone. The local Crows left it well alone (something they don't need to do with the bigger Stellers and White Tailed Eagles). The above photo was taken with a 1.4 teleconverter as was this video.........

This video was cropped and downsized, for the full HD version go here.

I still haven't quite got the hang of liveview, this video with DSLR lark is tricky to master as is editing it on the PC.

To be honest the jury is still out on the 7D/100-400L combo when used with a teleconverter and I took it off, these shots below are without.

It was by the side of the road and attracted several folk with large expensive lenses. We spent part of the afternoon with 'dotetin' (blog linked on the right) and although the Hawk Eagle was the top bird on show today the usual stuff was still around. Not many BIFs today...........here is an adult Stellers Sea Eagle in a tree instead.

As you can see we finally had some decent weather, after a whole month with only a couple of half days with blue skies.

I got several blurry out of focus shots of Crested Kingfisher, other stuff upstream included White Tailed Eagle, Jay, Brown Dipper, Japanese Wagtail, Goldeneye, Whooper Swan and Goosander.

Lots of Rooks around today. Near Onuma, just outside Yakumo and this one in a supermarket car park in Hakodate.

Rooks are a scarce winter visitor in northern Japan.

After Yakumo we headed up to Oshamanbe and the Long Tailed Ducks (well 3 of them) were in the harbour.

Other ducks in the harbour included several Wigeon. One of the drakes had a green crescent on its head, was this a hybrid with an American Wigeon? I didn't get a decent shot of it, it looked just like a regular Wigeon otherwise............

Lots of Goldeneye and Scaup..........

Lots of Glaucous and Glaucous Winged Gulls around, here's an adult Glaucous Gull.

The weather took a turn for the worse and sleet turned to snow on the drive home. The forecast for next week is very bad, well below zero all week and more snow so we got really lucky this morning........

I got drunk and fell asleep on the sofa watching Liverpool v Bolton last night. i'll stay up late tonight to watch the Man U v Arsenal game. A tough one to decide who I want to win, I dislike them both.............but I'd rather a northern team with a few English players won tonight's game. Having said that I'll despair if Man U win the league again (god that means I hope Chelsea do it).

Christmas in Hokkaido

Another Christmas Day been and gone in Hokkaido (my 7th in the last 8 years).

Despite my griping about the locals' cheesy, tacky and (if I was a practising christian) disrespectful take on Christmas I don't mind it here at all. Most years we go to Onuma and the area around the lake is very quiet and certainly looks seasonal with the snow, ice, pine trees and berries. We had lunch in an overpriced but pleasant log house style restaurant. I had a pizza. Unseasonal but tasty.



Most interesting species of the day was Rook. This is quite a scarce winter visitor to Japan and there was a flock of over 100 feeding in the fields on the outskirts of Hakodate. They were here briefly last winter too (last winter's flock also contained Daurian Jackdaw which weren't there this time).







Over at Onuma there were 6 Geese in amongst the Whooper Swans and Mallards. 2 Bean Goose and 4 White Fronted Goose. A bit shy, these were the best shots I could get. Grey Geese tend to be scarce around these parts (though they are common enough in certain areas of Japan). I managed to get close up shots of a female Goldeneye and lone Coot.







Also around at Onuma were 2 White Tailed Eagle, flocks of Redpoll, Siskin and Brambling, 4 Smew and the usual common woodland species.

Today we headed east to Esan.



Mt Esan, a broody steaming volcano if you want to sound romantic. Or a mountain with bits of smoke coming out and a smell of rotten eggs if you don't. A few interesting birds on the coast. Groups of Brent Goose every few miles, large rafts of Red Breasted Merganser, Slavonian and Red Necked Grebes, Glaucous and Glaucous Winged Gulls.

Not a vintage day for photos today so here's a couple of crappy shots to give you a flavour of the area. The Harlequin Ducks were bobbing around well offshore (I'd been hoping they'd be perched on rocks just off the road like they weer a few weeks ago) and there's also a pic of the 2 types of Cormorant we get round here. The big one is a Temimncks and the smaller ones are Pelagic Cormorants.





We finished off on a small river just on the eastern edge of Hakodate. Little Grebe, Great White Egret and Whooper Swan were present as was this small unassuming wader. A Long Billed Plover.



So the year is just about to end, maybe 1 full day's birding to be had depending on the weather. I'll probably post my favourite pictures of 2007 before the 31st, if I remember.

I'm getting a bit tired of sorting through photos, deleting the crappy ones (lots of those), choosing the 'best' ones, converting those from RAW files to jpeg, adjusting levels, cropping and sharpening in photoshop where necessary and then uploading. I seem to spend more time processing photos than taking them. Especially when I get home and have 250 similar quality (ie average) photos...........one of my many NEW Year resolutions will be to find a more efficient way of doing this. As well as losing weight, saving money and finally starting that great script/novel I know I'm going to write one day sometime eventually.

If you had a disappointing Christmas just thank the lord you weren't that fellow in San Francisco who get mauled to death by a Siberian Tiger. Maybe it was a Japanese Tiger and the man was carrying a bucket of KFC.