Waders, Foxes and Bugs.

This will be a long post. You have been warned.



A Red Necked Stint at Mukawa on Wednesday. I just got back bfrom a 2 night camping trip in Hidaka in central Hokkaido. We started off on Wednesday morning at Kamiso. 2 Bar Tailed Godwit, 2 Red Necked Stint and a Kingfisher were present. Heading northeast we stopped at Shiraoi for a break. Osprey, Eastern Marsh Harrier and lots of hirundines/Pacific Swifts were on the move. We also saw a Magpie near Tomakomai on the way back.



Anyone who has driven (or been driven) in this part of the world will remember this huge bear and crab atop a seafood etc souvenir emporium. And inside you can get bearmeat curry.



Don't fancy that? How about a seal curry? Mmmmmmmmm. Taste that spicy blubber.



And so on to Mukawa. We stopped off here both ways. The freshwater pools have almost all been drained leaving only a few puddles. It was very hot and bright both days and it was hard work finding any waders but there were some about. 10 or so Red Necked Stint, 5 or 6 Wood Sandpiper, 2 Whimbrel, 2 Eastern Curlew, 1 Grey Tailed Tattler, 1 Curlew Sandpiper, 1 Pacific Golden Plover, 1 unidentified snipe species (probably Lathams) and 2 Little Ringed (?) Plovers. There was another Harrier here and an immature Goshawk. The birds were pretty skittish and I got some lousy flight shots only.






We camped near Hidaka. Hawfinch, Eurasian Jay and Japanese Grosbeak were the most interesting birds around. There were however lots of bugs.



We spent a day up at Furano and Biei. These are very popular spots for Japanese tourist to, basically, come and look at trees in fields. There are sometimes flowers or lone trees standing in the middle of said fields. Coachloads of J-folk come and gawk. Souvenir stands blasting piped muzak pollute the ambience even more. The famous trees in question feature in Japanese tobacco advertising. Trees in fields. Great.

Furano is also famous for melons and lavender (and flowers generally). The lavender had gone but there were still lots of flowers which attracted lots of butterflies. Dunno what this one was (Blue Swallowtail?) but it wouldn't stay still.






And here's a other kind of Swallowtail.






A decent macro lens is on the list (about #6) of things to get. I didn't need a macro lens for this Red Fox which was hanging out on the road in the mountains.









The most numerous wildlife on the trip was this king of dragonfly. They were everywhere. We went over a mountain pass that was over 3000 feet up and they were abundant there too. There must be literally millions of them.






Listened to the ipod a lot in the car. Frank Black (lots of random tracks) , Neil Young (Decade) and The Stranglers (Rattus Norvegicus) were my faves this time round. Missed England v Germany (can't believe I didn't give a toss about the result in that game) but after the Liverpool v Chelsea travesty I needed a break from football anyway.

Heat, Herons and Shelob.

A Grey Heron and a juvenile Black Crowned Night Heron.

There are always a few Heron species around from late summer. And they're usually pretty jumpy. By the time you've got your camera up and ready they've already taken off. I'll never make a decent photographer. For flight shots I need a high shutter speed but my camera settings are always preset on the expectation birds will be relatively stationary. By the time I remember I need to switch from aperture mode to shutter mode they're flapping towards the horizon.

Over at Kamiso the wader passage has begun and the first Black Headed Gulls since spring appeared. 1 Bar Tailed Godwit (a local tick) and 3 Terek Sandpiper were close enough to ID but too far for a picture. We went back the next day but the jetskiers were out in force and there were no interesting birds about.

It's been really hot the last few days. 32-34 degrees celsius. Not that hot compared to many other places in the world but hot to the likes of me. Not much birding then. This little monster was hiding under the railing next to the river.



Still haven't quite worked out the 'macro' function on my cheap lens. Bits are always out of focus. It looks like it's preparing to spring on its prey like Shelob onto Frodo but actually it was upside down hanging quietly off the rail. It was flipped over in photoshop.

I watched the opening weekend of the footy season online. Not bad considering my low spec antique PC. I watched all the salient action but missed Gerard's goal live due to buffering. I sorted out my settings the next day and then Sky announced that they are showing the Premier League after all. Only a week late.

Around August 15 down the years:

1984 (Aug 17/20). Ribble near Penwortham. Wader passage underway. 11 species in all including 300 Golden Plover, 200 Dunlin, also Ruff, Greenshank and Spotted Redshank. Passerines on the move included Winchat, Lesser Whitethroat and Wheatear.

1986. (Aug 17). More waders at Penwortham including Little Stint and Black Tailed Godwit, 1 Peregrine and 30　Shoveler were also present.

1987 (multiple visits). 5 or 6 trips up the Ribble. This was the time of my A level results and I thought it may have been the last summer in Preston for a long time. Not quite true though I've only been back a handful of times in August since. As above lots of waders.

1995 (Aug?). The hottest summer I can recall in England. I visited a friend in Worcestershire and god it was hot. Is it hot everywhere I go in mid August? Here's a pic of me and a friend in England's yellow and pleasant land in 1995.



1997 (Aug ?) My only ever visit to Italy. 2 or 3 days in Florence (by train from Munich. My Italian list is zero. I may have seen Pigeons. A 3 day drinking binge in the burning heat of a Tuscan summer sounds a lot more exciting than the reality. Here's a pic of me looking dazed and confused in Innsbruck en route to Italy. My travelling companion gave me this several years later and is the only picture I have of the whole trip.



1998 (Aug?) A camping trip to the Austrian Alps and another very hot weekend. An idyllic weekend sleeping under the stars up in the mountains getting stoned, eating salami and cheese, drinking cheap red wine and watching shooting stars. I left Munich a few days later and turned 30 a month or so later. Like the Italy trip no photos survived (I lost them all in the move back to England). This really felt like it was the end of something (my youth I suppose) I can't recall any birds from this specific weekend although I remember hearing Marmots. Lots of them. And you know those Alpine cows with those tinkling bells? Annoying when you're trying to sleep. And one of them tried to eat my shorts too.

2001 (Aug 18) 4 Red Necked Stint in a tiny sewage outlet in front of a pachinko parlour in Hakodate.

2002 (Aug 16). A long visit back to the UK with my wife. Nowhere near as many waders as on the 80's. Only 5 or 6 species. Grennshank was the most noteworthy.

2003 (Aug 14) Hobby flying s over Hakodate.

Swallows, Sunflowers and dead Dragonflies

We drove up to Kuromatsunai again today in the rain. The weather has been lousy the last week or so. Grey skies, muggy humid temperatures, rain, thunder. In keeping with the Grey theme the 3 most interesting birds near my flat this week have been Grey Wagtail, Grey Starling and Grey Heron.

The Barn Swallow chicks must have been born since our last visit.






The parents were very busy and completely ignored me snapping away.








In between the showers back down to Yakumo we saw Goshawk, Great and Little Egret, Black Browed Reed Warbler, Osprey, Little Ringed Plover, Common Sandpiper, Brown Thrush and Common Kingfisher. There were also loads of Pacific Swift heading south all along the coast.

Here's a scene to remind me it is actually summer.






We went to the local festival last Friday. I took lots of photos of random strangers basically. The one below was the best.


A bit different from the Notting Hill Carnival. Hakodate's festival is of course much smaller and is very efficiently organised. Not much spontaneity here. When I first came to Japan I saw a similar summer parade in Iwaki that was fairly impressive if a little militaristic.



I can remember going to Notting Hill Carnival several times in the early 90's. Heavy drinking in the pub beforehand and lots of dope smoking during the actual parade, eardrums assaulted by loud bass heavy music, huge crowds.............god I'd probably hate it now. Once I was so wasted I lay down on the pavement near the Rough Trade shop (is that still there?) as people stepped over me and I thought my head would explode because of the huge speakers on the next block. Amazingly I wasn't robbed. Not that I had anything worth pinching.

I wasn't in as much as a mess as this dragonfly caught in a spider's web. Every August millions of dragonflies suddenly appear. They're everywhere. Red ones. Yellow ones. They don't appear to enjoy sitting atop reeds or flowers posing for photos so this unlucky soon to expire individual was the only shot I could get.



Frustratingly it still isn't clear if the Premier League is going to be on TV or not. I keep getting fobbed off when I call ("we have no information sir.....please check back later" etc etc). A movie I watched last week was 'The Machinist'. I need the same diet as Christian Bale (well for 2 or 3 weeks perhaps).

Butterflies and Part 1 of a Summer Festival

They like their firework displays do the Japanese. Hakodate has several big ones a year and this week is the Minato Matsuri ('port festival'). I snapped these pics from my balcony (the firework display is about 2km away as the crow flies). This was an octopus. I missed the squid one (Hakodate is famous for squid). Still same difference. There's a big parade tomorrow which I'll go to. They do a squid 'dance'. Thousands of local people in formation prancing around like idiots. I'll be an observer only of course. No doubt I'll do a sarcastic post about it at the weekend.






Not much happening on the birding front so I took some more butterfly shots. My cheap DSLR lens has a handy macro feature (though it'd be good to own a real macro lens is far down the priority list of things I want to buy). Dunno which type this one is.






There'll be lots more bugs now the weather has started to warm up. Big fat badass spiders in a week or 2 and some more big moths perhaps.






The finale was pretty nice.






One huge firework display I can remember was Preston Guild in 1992. If you could ignore the cheesy Enyaesque music pumping out from the stage that is. I was pretty stoned I recall. In the pubs they had beer at 1972 prices and a late closing afterwards too. The next one is 2012.

Birds? Nowt. The Shrikes/Martins/Reed Warblers/Starlings are busy with family life. Flocks of Red Cheeked Starlings can be seen most in the evenings going to roost. Not as impressive as the huge Common Starling flocks I used to see at Preston Bus Station mind. Here's a small flock of mainly immature birds. They'll be off to the tropics in 6 or 7 weeks.



So I still don't know if the Premier League will be on TV in Japan this season. C'mon skyperfect. Sort yourselves out.

I watched '300' the other night. What absolute tosh. About the same level as 'Troy'. That guy who was Achilles' trusty sidekick in 'Troy' is the king of Sparta's trusty sidekick in '300'. It's the exact same actor. Lazy casting department.

Around August 2 down the years:

1982 (August ?). Somerset/Dorset. A family holiday down south. We visited Radipole where I got my first ever Kingfisher and Great Crested Grebe. At Poole I got my first ever Rock Pipit.

1983 (August 6-). North Yorkshire. Another family holiday. My first ever Green Woodpecker, Red Grouse and a few common seabirds around Whitby. Dunno why I've never been back to Whitby. Beautiful place.

1984 (August 2). Leighton Moss. This place seems to get pretty good birds these days but not back on this date in 1984. Winchat was the most interesting.

1986 (August 2). Mere Sands Wood. Little Ringed Plover, Cuckoo, Ruddy Duck......not much at Marshside either. Yellow Wagtail. A few days later (the 9th) I went on my first ever successful twitch. Spotted Sandpiper somewhere near Burnley.

1987 (August 2) Seaforth/Frodsham. Lots of Little Gull at Seaforth plus about a dozen or so of the commoner wader species.

2002 (31 July-) Kos Greece. Part of my honeymoon. Didn't do too much birding.The most dramatic thing that happened was I slipped in the shower and cracked my head open. I had to go the primitive hospital in Kos Town to get stitched up. My wife thought they would do a CAT scan. Until she saw the hospital that is. Eleanoras Falcon was seen most nights from the balcony, I also got Red Rumped Swallow, Bee-eater, Audouins and Yellow Legged Gull, lots of wheatears that may have been Isabellines and Corys Shearwater from the ferry to Turkey. Here's a picture of my romantically staring out over the olive groves.



2006 (Hakodate). Osprey and Night Heron on the river near my flat.

Hirundines and Chats

We went back to the road station at Kuramatsunai to take pictures of the (Barn) Swallows on their nests but instead got some Asian House Martin chicks only a few feet away from their hirundine cousins. At least 4 in the tiny nest and they appeared almost full-grown. The parents wouldn't feed them if I stood near the nest so I fired off a few shots and let them be.






They seem to breed earlier than the Swallows who didn't appear to be feeding any young yet.



It was a bit chilly down at Yakumo. Not much around here. A female Eastern Marsh Harrier seen from the car window was the bird of the day and there were the inevitable Ospreys fishing on the river and the Heronry was as busy as ever (no decent place to take photos though). These Stonechats posed fairly nicely for the camera.






We finished the day at Onuma. The Ruddy Kingfishers appear to have moved away from the nest (less photographers around and those that remained were a few hundred yards down the road). I could hear an unfamiliar bird song in the forest. A repeated two phrase song. I checked it when I got back and I think it may have been a Siberian Thrush. I've never seen one before (and the forest is so overgrown I don't think I could have located it even if I'd tried). Actually it's the only relatively 'common' passerine likely to occur in south Hokkaido I've yet to see.

After my problems the other day I ordered a new compact digicam. The Fuji Finepix F31fd. It seems to be rated very highly both as a point and shoot and also for digiscoping. Only 100 quid for camera/spare battery/1GB memory card.

Only 2 weeks until the footie season starts. Skyperfect TV (the satellite station here) haven't confirmed they're showing the Premier League yet! Of course all Celtic games are on (they have a Japanese player)............imagine if they have Scottish football but nothing from England. My god.