Dusky Thrushes

Well it's been a quiet last few days since the grebe-fest last week. Not much in my neighbourhood. Quite a lot of Dusky Thrush have been passing through.......

They are the only Thrush species in Hokkaido in winter (unless you're lucky enough to get a vagrant such as Fieldfare). 6 other species either breed in summer or pass through on migration but they are all timid and shy forest dwellers. Dusky Thrushes hop across gardens and parks just like Thrush species do back in the UK..................

As you can see we had a little more snow this week, the weather has been pretty poor the last 3 days. A Peregrine was a nice fly-over bird yesterday but a feast bird against grey skies didn't produce any decent photos. A Little Grebe was on the river today, Grey Heron and Sparrowhawk were seen from my living room window (flying) and there are still quite a few Hawfinch around.

And this must be the scruffiest looking White Wagtail in East Asia at the moment.

I got up to watch the Chelsea v Inter Milan game this morning, surprised at how poor Chelsea were. They're starting to look a little old in the tooth.

Looks like no car at the weekend, I may catch the train to Kamiso, hopefully the Grebes and other waterbirds will still be there.............

Black Necked Grebes

On Sunday it was cold and windy but fairly bright and not raining or snowing. We spent an hour or so at Kamiso and I got some nice Black Necked Grebe shots. There were fewer than a few days ago. I saw several perish in either fishing lines or killed by Gulls, these must be the tough ones who survived.

Many were coming into summer plumage.

Some were kind of raggedy........

Like I said before I had lots and lots of shots to sort through, many of which looked very similar.

They were pretty tame but most of the best shots were from out of the car window.

They really are an attractive bird to photograph and this is my best set of shots of this species......my wife doesn't share my enthusiasm, I think the red eyes freak her out a little. She calls then 'the evil little red-eyed diving birds'.

I tried to get some nice group shots.

They were in the harbour for the fish, it was tricky to get a photo of them feeding. These were the best I could manage.

I won't be going back to the harbour until Friday at the earliest. I don't know if they'll still be there, hopefully they will. After my griping about the lack of Crossbills/Waxwings this winter the Grebes have provided ample compensation.

We'll learn if it is feasible to fix our old banger of a car next weekend, if not we may be carless for a while (right through until Autumn perhaps).

Oh and I'd be very interested in any opinions by birders more knowledgeable than I about the Crossbill below.......................................

On this day (March 15th)....................

March 15th 2009.

A bit of a mystery this one. White Winged or Common Crossbill? I suspected a variant of the latter but I wasn't really sure.

There was a bit of a debate on birdforum about this, the consensus seemed to be that it was a Common Crossbill. Others disagreed, including Mark Brazil and Sean Minns.

I saw a similar bird in 2008 (no photo alas) and they are known to pass through the area and have been ringed. This one has a ring...............shame we can't read it...........

Any opinions on the ID of this one would be gratefully received................

Red Throated Diver and some old friends..........

We headed over to Kamiso this morning to check the harbour again. Yesterday had been very very windy and the Red Throated Diver must have taken refuge in the relative calm of the harbour. I could even take this video. handheld out of the car. This is the original with terrible sound (it was very windy and I think my hand was touching the camera's internal microphone).

And here it is with the sound replaced by some sound effects.........

It looked absolutely knackered. And some of its beak appears to be missing, look at he lower mandible..........

There were hardly any fisherman on the harbour side, we got some great shots of the Black Necked Grebes which I'll post in a day or two. I filled up a 16GB card again, including the shots from earlier in the week I have about 1500 photos on my hard drive to sort through. And I already deleted all the obviously bad ones..............

There were 2 Red Necked Grebes today as well as the various duck species which today also included a few very wary Wigeon. My wife was sick of the harbour so we headed over to Onuma to feed the Nuthatches and Tits.

Our clapped out old banger of a car was making all kinds of worrying noises and we decided to head home.............it may be a while before we see the Nuthatches again..........

I  now have to sort through all those Black Necked Grebe photos. I swear I spend more time processing photos than taking them, sometimes it almost feels like 'work'. If only I could get paid for this!

Some more harbour birds........

I went back to the harbour at Kamiso, the birds were basically the same but it was even darker, most of today's shots were at ISO 800.

There were slightly fewer birds. There were lots of people fishing from the side of the harbour: 3 Grebes got snagged in the fishing lines and managed to pull a fishing rod into the water, they swam off with the rod following them, sadly I don't rate their chances of survival very highly.

Like I say, very dark meaning lots of underexposed shots that came out noisy in postprocessing.

Some shots would have been great if the light had been better.

There were about 30 of them today............

Yesterday I saw thousands and thousands of Red Breasted Merganser offshore. A few ventured into Kamiso harbour again.........

This is a female.

And this creepy looking one is a young male moulting into adult plumage.

There were 2 Great Crested Grebes on the sea. I saw a Little Grebe on the river yesterday so that means all 5 species of Grebe are in Hakodate at the moment. The Red Necked was still around today.

The sun came out just before I left............

There were several Glaucous Gull around, one of 7 Gull species in and around the harbour.

Here's a bird I've never photographed before: a Red Throated Diver. This was the other side of the sea wall.

I really want to get those Grebes in good light................

Liverpool lost again, I've stopped caring.

On this day (March 12th)....................

March 12th 2008.


Female Black Woodpecker at Onuma.


One of the local specialties, they can be seen at many locales in south Hokkaido.


This is a regularly seen species in early spring at Onuma, this female was especially tame as she flitted around the forest checking out nestholes. The male was also around but for some reason is always much more wary............