Crossbills, fascists and a death in the fishtank

Some of a small group of Common Crossbill near my flat this afternoon. These are the first I've seen in Hakodate for ages (since 2004 in fact) but like Redpoll and Asian Rosy Finch they are present this winter after a long absence.



Also around in the same general area were a party of Long Tailed Tit, a species I haven't seen in town before today. They were as active as ever but this individual stayed still long enough for a couple of nice shots.





Also around today were Peregrine, Redpoll, Brambling and lots of Dusky Thrush/Grey Starling everywhere feeding on the abundant berries (I've given up on Waxwings thsi winter). I watched the Crossbills feed above me in some pinetrees for a few moments. Odd looking birds it has to be said. I assume this is just the regular Red/Common Crossbill. I remember in springs 2003/4 there were loads of them and they were very tame. The first ones I ever saw were in Scotland in 1984. I counted them as 'Scottish' Crossbill (hey they were in Scotland weren't they?) but they were just as likely Common or even Parrot Crossbill.







Whilst walking around town today I couldn't avoid these charming folk. Snapped with my 100-400 lens (not the ideal lens for shooting right wing propaganda vans).



'Uyoku dantai' they are called. Japanese Nationalists. They drive very very slowly around town in those black trucks with absurd pompous military music blasting out, bellowing out slogans about something or other (Japan's glorious imperial past or kick out those nasty foreigners or some such nonsense). If there are laws about noise pollution the police choose not to enforce them (they're probably off-duty cops driving the bus anyway). The music sounds a bit like the theme from 'The Water Margin' only not as cool. You can read more about these groups here.

There are rumours that the Russian head of state will visit Hakodate this year after the G8 summit up in Toya. These right wing groups are constantly protesting about how the Russians cheekily pinched several Japanese islands at the end of the war (memo to J-fascists:riding slowly around my neighbourhood blasting out that crappy music will never ever ever result in Russia renouncing those territorial gains. Trust me on this one. I studied politics at University). The upshot of that will apparently be hordes of these black vans/buses descending on Hakodate to annoy the visting Russian delegation. F***ing wonderful. I'll have to make sure I'm out of town for that one.

You know that shrimp I bought on Tuesday? It's dead, bobbing around lifelessly at the back of the fishtank. Hank the Clownfish is a psycho.

The footy season plumbed new depths last night. I actually laughed when Barnsley scored. I mean how worse can the 2007/8 season get? I can't really see Rafa surviving now unless we have a good Champions League run. By 'good' I mean 'win it'.

A boring week in winter

The weather turned a bit nasty this week. Rain on Monday which lay on top of the ice and froze on Tuesday, extremely strong blizzards on Wednesday and dull snowy wintry days on Thursday and Friday. So I didn't get out much (plus the wife has been working leaving me carless). We did make it out to Onuma but the weather was awful and there wasn't much about apart from the usual.





Around my neighbourhood I saw Hawfinch, Long Tailed Rosefinch, Brambling, Redpoll, Merlin and Peregrine as well as flocks of Grey Starling and Dusky Thrush (but still no Waxwing). Photo opps were pretty limited and I was reduced to taking pics of the local Teal on the river.







*WARNING*


Boring nerdy topic coming up


I've also been trying to suss out some of the more intricate features of photoshop. I've been using photoshop for about 18 months or so but only did simple stuff like levels/saturation/unsharp mask etc. I'm now working with selections and hope to move on to masking and layers. It's frustrating and this added to the need to start filling out my tax returns has given me a headache. Here's a pic that needed photoshopping (it wasn't that great to start with anyway as I had to crop it heavily).



The blurry stuff to the right is the blue railing on the riverside fence. Still don't know the best way to correct this kind of stuff (maybe it's impossible anyway) but I bet it's fiddly, takes ages and is f**king annoying as hell to do. I did lots of stuff to the image......magic wand tool, select colour, desaturate...........I'll work it out eventually I hope.

Here's our new addition to the fishtank. His name is P-Man.



A lot of the cheaper inverterbrates have been dying off at an alarming rate so at ¥1500 a pop I hope this Cleaner Shrimp manages to stay alive a while yet. He is being relentlessly bullied by the Clownfish who is king of the tank and is a lazy spoilt bast*rd of a fish.

So not much happening round here at the moment. The Japanese media is currently in a frenzy about contaminated frozen gyoza (dim sum) from China. It has allowed the Japanese press to indulge in rabid anti-Chinese sh*t stirring in a racist 'how can we trust those dirty foreigners' tone that would make editors of the Daily Mail wince. The fact that the contamination may have been the fault of the Japanese import company or that Japan has had its' fair share of food scandals doesn't seem to concern them.

Can't believe the Premier League wants to play abroad. Is this the beginning of the end? I hope the EPL (to use its' international moniker) financially implodes so we can forget all this nonsense. I hate to say it but even a fully fledged Euro league would be better, at least Liverpool would stay in NW England and not be renamed 'Dubai Reds' or something like that.

By the middle of February I'm usually sick of winter and Feb 2008 is no exception. Roll on March.

Err...........more Brent Goose and Gulls

A bit of a grey Sunday in south Hokkaido. Not especially cold. But grey. I met Franck today (the French cheesemaker from Date Monbetsu). Franck is the person who kindly lent me the nice lens for the winter. You can check Franck's pictures here.

We went to see the Asian Rosy Finches near Menagawa. Except they weren't actually there. I did mamange to find a Japanese Accentor for Franck (a lifer for him) and there were also Peregrine, White Tailed Eagle, Rustic Bunting, Long Tailed Rosefinch and Harlequin Duck. There were lots of Glaucous Winged Gulls, they were everywhere. here's a 3rd winter bird with a 2nd winter Glaucous thrown in for good measure.





The Cormorants are coming into breeding plumage. Here's a shot of both the local species. The larger one is a Japanese Cormorant and the smaller one is a Pelagic Cormorant.



The Brent Geese are photogenic even in crappy light like today.







One annoying habit I have is that I change camera settings and then forget to change them back to something more suitable, like this horribly underexposed Red Breasted Merganser that photoshop couldn't quite rescue.



The Brent Geese are as relaible as the Nuthatches.







So I just watched Man City win the Manc derby, a bit of a surprise (and their fans didn't boo during the minute's silence either which was also a surprise). Hopefully Liverpool can spring a surprise at Chelsea (and lord knows we need the 3 points considering everyone else around us is winning these days).

I downloaded the recent series of 'Shameless' and the League of Gentlemen movie (which passed me by when it was released). Good solid north western fare for me stuck here on the other side of the Eurasian landmass.

Nobody is saying Hakodate is the Garden of Eden either by the way.

Goryokkau Park has been completely taken over by an absurd white elephant construction project, the area around the river at Yunokawa is being defiled by an unnecessary shopping centre (which we all know will be a mildew covered semi derilict eyesore within 10 years). And the people don't even know how to throw a party. Scatter.

Man about town

The Kingfisher returned today, here's a pic of it staring back at me. No car for a while so I've been beating the streets of Hakodate with the smaller 70-300 lens. The river is partially frozen and the Kingfisher appears to have relocated downstream close to another bird from early winter that I hadn't seen for a while.





The adult Thayers Gull, still present and still being bullied by the larger Slaty Backed and Herring (Vega) Gulls. It looked better against a blue sky. Today's weather was almost springlike (but still freezing) and the Spot Billed Ducks were displaying on the river (when they weren't slipping around on the ice).



I was hoping for some Waxwings against the blue sky but had no such luck. Here's a Dusky Thrush and Black Kite instead.





Not much else around the last couple of days. Varied Tit and Rustic Bunting were the most interesting. Struggling a bit for anything to say today or for any pictures. Here's a crappy one from my balcony.



So the 39th Premier League game will be played abroad then? The death of football as I knew it continues........the age of the Franchise looms. Hope I'm wrong. One thing I know though. Liverpool will never ever play at Chiyogodai stadium in Hakodate.

A morning with some Brent Geese

I walked down to Mt Hakodate this morning to get some shots of Brent Geeese and Harlequin Ducks. The Geese were especially obliging and in much larger numbers than the last time I was here. Actually there are loads of them everywhere this winter.





Lots of Scaup on the sea but not much else. Still no Waxwings despite the fact there are berries eveywhere for them to eat. Lots of Grey Starling, Dusky Thrush, Brown Eared Bulbuls and a couple of Hawfinch were making sure the berries wouldn't be around for much longer and the Waxwings may go hungry if they ever arrive.



There seemed to be 30 or so Brent Geese.





They hung around for a while and then flew off grunting in annoyance about something (probably about me).







The Harlequin Ducks were nowhere near as co-operative. This male was the nearest I could get. It eyed me beadily before slipping off into the sea and out of range.





Not much else around town today. A couple of Redpoll, a Brown Dipper, a few Gulls of various common species. A couple of days ago we went back to the quarry near Menagawa to try and get some Rosy Finch pics. They were extremely flighty and impossible to approach. It didn't help they were being actively hunted by both a male Peregrine and a female Sparrowhawk and 2 Common Buzzard (I have crappy pics of all 3 on my PC). This is the best I could manage.



The wooded cliffside was full of birds actually. Japanese Accentor, Marsh and Varied Tits, Japanese Pygmy Woodpecker and several Rustic Bunting. Unlike the Rosy Finches they seem to avoid predation by skulking around. This one showed for a couple of seconds allowing me to fire off a blurry shot.



Also around was a White Tailed Eagle, lots of Glaucous Winged Gulls plus the inevitable seaducks and Brent Geese.



On Sunday I headed out to Kikonai with some new company. 2 other expats who had found this blog in fact. I wanted to show them some good stuff but there wasn't much about. Several Great White Egret, 4 or 5 White Tailed Eagles, a Black Throated or Pacific Diver plus the usual common stuff.

One of them lives up in Niseko and the other here in Hakodate. The former was talking about the booming economy of the Niseko area and afterwards I felt like I was living on another planet (I always feel like that when I meet successful people). The latter went to Yakumo last week on the train and impressively hiked down the river valley (with snowshoes handy) and saw the Eagles............I get my wife to drive and take photos out of the car window.

No pictures of mountains or frozen lakes today. Here's a couple of Hakodate scenes.





The boats are for catching squid in case you were wondering.

Around February 6 down the years:

Ths will be the last time I write this kind of stuff (I started doing it 12 months ago so I've dredged up all the remotely interesting stuff already) so I'll have to think of something else to pad out my posts.

1984 (Feb 2) Marshside. Hen Harrier, Snow Bunting, Twite plus all the usual waders and wildfowl.

2000 (early Feb) Yakumo. My first ever visut to see the Stellers Sea eagles. A wonderful day. They seemed to be feeding very close to the road and I still haven't found that spot again (and trust me I've looked). Very very heavy snow I recall.

2001 (early Feb) Rio Cauro in Venezuela.



I went on a week's trip into the Amazon jungle. There were about 10 of us on a small boat and we camped in local villages. Of course there were no roads. Together with my 2 trips to the Himalaya this was the most interesting place I've ever been. Some random memories from the trip.

I had quite nasty food posoining the first night. As I crouched over the hole in the ground just outside our camp with foul noxious things squirting out of my rectum I heard a humming sound. Oh no I thought. A huge hornet or something is going to sting my arse. But no. It was a hummingbird. It was beautiful, perching a couple of feet from my head and looking at me quizically. It flew off and I don't know what species it was.

A hike through the jungle to some amazing waterfalls. I have some crappy scanned pictures on my hard drive but they can't do it justice. I took a dip and whilst I was stripping off and chaging into my swimming shorts some local women (amazons I guess but they were pretty fat and didn't look much like warrior queens) came to look at my naked body with gasps of awe. OK I made the last part up but they did hang around the bushes reting to get a peek. Honestly.

One day a group of pecaries (pig type things) swam across the river in front of our boat. Our guide asked us if we wanted to eat one. I said ok why not. Our guide leaned over the side of the boat and picked one up by its' hind legs and held its' head under the water until it drowned. He then battered it over the head with an oar to make sure it was really dead. It was the toughest meat I've ever eaten (until I tried Hokka Hokka Bento's Steak Donburi last summer that is).

Me and a Polish guy ran out of cigs. Our guide got us some raw tobacco and some leaves to roll it in. Everyone else looked on in bemusement as we rolled tobacco in the same way we rolled joints back home. It was pretty nasty and gave me a sore throat. We ran out of beer the next evening which was more serious. It was a bad night all round as i also fell out of my hammock later on as I was pi**ed out of my head on cheap nasty rum.

Birds? Absolutely loads and loads but I'm sorry to say I struggled trying to ID most of them. The bird I most wanted to see was the Harpy Eagle. I saw plenty of big (very big) raptors but couldn't get a firm ID on any of them. They probably weren't Harpy Eagles anyway. Macaws were abundant (Scarlet plus Red and Green) as were other parrots and toucans (I have no idea which species). A Bat Falcon was pretty cool as were Swallow Tailed Kites, Black Skimmer, several Caracara species, Large Billed and Yellow Billled Terns, White Necked Heron, Little Blue Heron, Collared Plover and oh lots of other things I can hardly remember. Fulvous Crested Tanager for example. The most common species were Spotted Sandpiper and Olivaceous Cormorant. We also saw those weird Amazon Dolphins and (I think-my mind is a little hazy here) some of those giant Otters. Oh and Pirhana of course..........


2005 (Feb 9) Yunokawa. Goshawk, Glaucous Gull, Red Necked grebe and Buff Bellied Pipit. Shame the construction lobby has completely ruined this area...........