Happy BIFday #1

A very productive day up at Yakumo with lots and lots of BIF (birds in flight) shots. This post has pics of one of the 2 eagle species: the White Tailed Eagle.

It's been over 2 weeks since we were last at Yakumo and the eagles are a lot tamer now. Well perhaps tame isn't the right word, less shy would be a better term.

They were spread up and down the river. The river level seemed lower and there were lots of dead salmon for them to feast on. This one was feeding in a tree when I surprised it and it dropped its lunch........

A blizzard hit south Hokkaido in the afternoon but we had a window of reasonable weather beforehand...........

The 7D is very handy for these type of shots. They aren't heavily cropped, they were pretty close. Sometimes too close.

All the above shots are of adults, here are some younger birds.............

They weren't always on the wing............

More pics tomorrow, this time the Stellers Sea Eagles.

Can't believe the Premier League schedule has been ravaged by the weather. With one thing and another I haven't watched that much footy this season and I was looking forward to watching some this weekend. I caught the Arsenal v Everton game last night which was pretty good but there's nothing at all on tonight. Some cricket would be nice but that ain't on til next week sometime, I'm somewhat surprised England have made it through to the final test 1-0 up..........

I watched 'The Invention of Lying' last week which had a few laugh out loud moments, as did the remake of 'Day of the Triffids' although I'm not sure if it was unintentional or not. Eddie Izzard's escape from the plane crash and subsequent rise to power in post-apocalyptic London was hilarious, I'm sure he was deliberately hamming it up for laughs. At least I hope he was.

On this day (January 9th)....................

January 9th 2008.

A Long Tailed Tit on the outskirts of Hakodate. This is the ultra cute white headed race (japonicus)  found in Hokkaido. Other races, presumably from continental Asia, occur occasionally in Hakodate but lack the pure white head.

This is a difficult species to photograph. They simply refuse to stay still and even if you manage to get one in focus it is usually obscured by a branch. Not this time however, I got lucky at last.

I even entered this one in a photo contest in a local camera store (the theme was 'winter'). I got one of the consolation runner up prizes, a piece of electronic tat which I have forgotten about completely now it's somewhere in the house, some kind of scrubbing device I think.

A quiet old week

A quiet week in snowy Hakodate, here are a few of the common species around. A Black Kite carrying some spinal column type carrion thingy, a heavily cropped male Daurian Redstart and a Dusky Thrush playing in the snow.....

Rustic Bunting, Yellow Throated Bunting, lots of Hawfinch and that's about it. The heavy snow doesn't appear to have brought any wanderers to Hakodate, at least not to my neighbourhood. Hopefully underfoot conditions will improve next week so I can go out and find something interesting.

Graham Onions: what a star.

On this day (January 7th)....................

January 7th 2009.






The winter of 2008/9 was not a good winter for the local wintering eagles at Yakumo. A very poor autumn salmon run meant a shortage of food, this adult White Tailed Eagle did at least manage to find a rotting salmon to eat but it was harried mercilessly by the attending crows.


This was snapped from a bridge, most of these scenes (I guess)  are usually on inaccessible parts of the river or places where it isn't safe to sop the car. The eagle must have been really hungry to feed so close to the road. Several dead eagles were found in the area apparently starved to death, in the same month I remember seeing a dead adult Stellers Sea Eagle floating in the sea at Sawara.

On this day (January 6th)....................

January 6th 2008.


 A female Yellow Throated Bunting on the outskirts of Hakodate. In Mark Brazil's latest book this species appears to have a new name: 'Elegant Bunting'. That sounds a bit better but for now I'll use the old name.........


These are winter visitors, usually in small groups. They like poking around under bushes on the edge of ricefields or parks. The males are much brighter but never come close enough to my camera.


This photo was taken down a dirt track in Kamiso, I had to flounder through heavy snow to get there. 2 years ago this spot was great for birds but despite going back there the last 2 winters I haven't seen much at all. The dirt track in question seems to be a favourite spot for locals to dump consumer durables and old tyres.

Weather keeping me indoors and grumpy..........

5 days into 2010 and I've barely been outside, heavy snow, grey grey skies, slushy/icy/snowbound roads and sidewalks...............so I'm stuck at home getting grumpier by the day. The above Jay was at Onuma a coupe of days ago when the snow relented for a few hours. This one below was taken with a flash, something I almost never have to do for bird pics.

Not much else at Onuma except the common residents.

Lots of Glaucous Gull at Kamiso, a White Tailed Eagle in Ono and a minor invasion of Hawfinch into Hakodate provided some points of  interest in the gloom.

Lots of red berries everywhere, hopefully the Waxwings will be here in a couple of weeks.

The snow scuppered my annual first week of January trip up to Yakumo which always seems to produce

nice photo opps for the eagles. They'll be around for another 7 or 8 weeks of course, fingers crossed the weekend will see an improvement in the weather.

2010 begins

Some very cold looking Glaucous Gulls at Mukawa earlier this week.

2010 has begun with a huge snowfall, we went out today but it was a whiteout with few birds to see and no photos at all. There must have been 30 or 40cm snow last night and it hasn't stopped snowing all day. It looks like winter 2009/10 may be a pretty cold one here in Hokkaido........

So here is what happened on our end of year trip this week...........

We headed up north on very icy roads (seeing Rook and Daurian Jackdaw on the way) and the first stop was Oshamabe to check the harbour there. The Long Tailed Ducks had arrived for the winter, the above male posed very nicely  for one photo but f**kwit here had the wrong camera settings so the shot was spoiled somewhat. By the time I'd changed the settings they'd swam off into the middle of the port...........

There were Black Necked Grebe and several other species of duck here.............like these Scaup and Goldeneye.

We then headed over a mountain pass to Toyoura and somewhat surprisingly the sun came out and for the rest of the day we got the only decent weather of the whole 5 day trip.

The river here is well known for eagles. There are less than at Yakumo (I counted about 20 or so) and most of them were White Tailed Eagles. There look to be some great spots for photos along the river (and close to the road too) but on this day they were all high up in the sky........

From here eastwards there was almost no snow (that would change on the way back though). We saw several Magpies in Tomakomai, Peregrine, Goshawk as well as lots of Great Egret and Whooper Swans. Our final stop of the day was at Mukawa.

There were lots of raptors here including the above Short Eared Owl. It actually reminded me a lot of the Ribble Marshes, the Owl as well as Hen Harrier and Merlin were around. The former proved tricky to get a shot of, here's the best of a bad bunch.

To complete the feeling like Lancashire in winter theme some Geese flew over too. These weren't Pinkfeet however..........

The White Fronts were presumably heading to the nearby Utonai-ko..........

The raptors were after lots of small birds hiding in the grass............like this Buff Bellied Pipit disturbed by a Merlin.

Before I went I said I had 3 target birds for the trip. Rough Legged Buzzard, Lapland Bunting and Snow Bunting. We saw a lot of Buzzards perched alongside various roads on the trip but it was impossible to stop and check every one. The local Common Buzzards are very white too which adds to the confusion..........here's one at Mukawa.

Still no firm ID on a Rough Legged........

I did get to see Lapland Bunting though. The Harrier and Owl frequently disturbed a small flock of 20 or so smallish birds. I couldn't tell what they were but in terrible light the next morning we went back and saw them clearly enough to ID. A new bird to my Japan list. Here is a very very poor record shot.

No Snow Buntings near Yakumo on the way back either but 1 out of 3 ain't bad.

I liked Mukawa, I had never been there in winter before (I've been several times in spring/summer) and have to say I was impressed. The birding was excellent. In addition to the raptors and Buntings there were lots of ducks offshore including Black and Velvet Scoters and more Glaucous Gulls than you could shake a stick at. These were taken on the way back when the weather had turned nasty.

We spent one night in Mukawa and then headed north. The bulk of the trip was in central Hokkaido in the Furano area. There was some seriously heavy snow here and almost no birds. We stayed in a very nice hotel in the middle of nowhere with superb food for a couple of nights and I lounged around in a warm log room reading a sci-fi novel whilst my wife was happy outside taking macro shots of snowflakes. It was a nice relaxing 2 nights in fact.

The nearby landscapes provided lots of gloomy moody wintry photo opps.

We headed back south stopping at the same places but the weather was so bad we couldn't get out of the car most of the time let alone take any pictures. The Long Taileds didn't want to swim close to the car at Oshamanbe, the eagles at Toyoura were higher up in the sky and by the time we got to Yakumo the blizzard was so intense that my camera simply couldn't focus on the flying eagles..............

The Mukawa stuff compensated for the total lack of birds in central Hokkaido, apart from a few Crows and Sparrows I can't recall seeing anything at all in fact. A Jay or 2 near the hotel..........that's about it.

I hope the snow relents this weekend.

Happy New Year to all regular readers to this blog, I really appreciate you taking the time to leave comments.

Whilst I was away Liverpool won twice and England won the Second Test by an innings. I guess I'll have to go away more often. I could follow the cricket on my wife's laptop (2 of the hotels had internet connections) or on the BBC site on my cellphone. The wonders of technology eh?