Last day with the Brents.

I walked down to Irifune Port today to see the Brent Geese. They usually depart at the end of March but they were still present today. About 30 all in all.

It was a nice day for it, very springlike. As winter finishes Oyaji Noise Season begins.This is the time of the year when the City Hall has to spend the remainder of its construction budget meaning scores of noisy probably pointless projects are taking place across town.

The Brent Geese were pretty noisy too and were honking and squabbling away.

I took a lot of video clips, I filled a 16GB card in fact..........here's a little compilation I made.

They are a very photogenic bird (even if the exposure can be a tad tricky).

I changed the colour profile on my camera to Adobe RGB (instead of sRGB). This is supposedly so I can make better prints. It might mean that if you're looking at these photos on certain browsers the colour may be a little muted. If it is that means I f**ked up something on the way from my camera via Canon DPP to Photoshop. Let me know if it that is the case. I looked it up on several sites but too be honest it was a little above my head and my eyes are tired and now I just want to relax and open a cold beer.

Not much else around. A Black Necked Grebe in full summer plumage, groups of Red Breasted Merganser, a few Scaup, Pelagic Cormorant and so on. In town it's been very quiet. Still lots of Hawfinch and Dusky Thrush, a lone Coot has been on the river the last 3 days and a male Kestrel flew over on Sunday. The latter 2 species are much rarer here than in the UK.

There were also lots of Harlequin Ducks today but they were a bit far away for a decent shot.

Liverpool were abject again against Man U. Torres was doing Heskey impressions in the 2nd half, Gerard has stopped caring, bar a couple of others the rest of the team isn't good enough and Benitez is sitting pretty on a huge contract that makes him unsackable.

I saw 'Avatar'. Nice looking film with a bit of a crap story. Not in 3D though (Hakodate doesn't have a 3D cinema). I'll watch last night's 'Shameless' in a minute...........

Please click this ranking link if you have the time. It won't do anything to your computer but it will make me appear slightly more popular in the Japanese birding blogging community. So it's got to be worth it.

On this day (March 23rd)....................

March 23rd 2009.


A female (or immature?) Common Crossbill in the park near my flat. This photo is uncropped, this was an incredibly tame individual that completely ignored me as it went about its business. I was kneeling down in the mud taking this shot...........


In Crossbill invasion years like 2009 the Crossbills tend to come to the ground more from late March as they have often exhausted the pine cone supplies up high on the tree.

OMG no car for a while................

I went back to Kamiso today with high hopes after last week. Today the light was good and the wind not too strong, perfect for photographing birds in the harbour. Only one problem. There were no birds at all when I arrived. Just a few of the resident Gulls. I looked around a few other spots and found a few ducks and other types of Gull but nothing especially interesting. Black Scoter, Glaucous Gull and that's about it.

When I returned to the harbour the above Red Throated Diver was there. Judging by the odd shaped beak it must be the same one from last week. Most of the time it was way out in the middle of the harbour.......it was a bit more active than last week at least.

I sat down and eventually it swam a bit closer, dived and popped up a few metres away.

It then swam out of the harbour and back out to sea where this photo was taken.

The only other birds in the harbour were 2 female Scaup, one female Goldeneye and this male Red Breasted Merganser.

Not a single Grebe anywhere, even on the sea.

I took the train to Kamiso, the first time I'd taken the train there since this day with the Red Necked Stints last year. I may have to do a lot more train journeys as our car is officially dead, it's not worth fixing and is probably too dangerous to drive anywhere in its current state. We aren't really in the position to get a replacement: that will have to wait until the autumn so it looks like 6 or so months without wheels. I'll miss quite a few interesting birds; the spring/autumn wader passage at Yakumo, the offshore Shearwater/Pharalope movements at Esan in May, the breeding warblers and wetland stuff at Oshamanbe......................but it can't be helped I suppose.

So I'll have to concentrate on stuff nearer home. You can't get any nearer than this, a Hawfinch snapped out of my living room window this morning.........

Didn't know they could do that with their heads.

On this day (March 18th)....................

March 18th 2007.


Black Crowned Night Heron near my flat. This was digiscoped with a 4MP compact camera handheld with a 50mm compact scope, good job the bird stayed so still.


This individual ended up costing me a lot of money as this was the spur I needed to get my first DSLR. It hung around for several days and I got a 400D shortly afterward but by the time my crappy Sigma 70-300mm lens arrived the bird had gone.


This is generally a summer visitor with the first birds arriving around this time. There isn't much vegetation for them to skulk in so it is one of the best times to watch them.


The trees it was hunting from have now been cut down by Hakodate City Hall. For no apparent reason.

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................