Groundhog day

Sometimes I wonder if I'm living life like Bill Murray on 'Groundhog Day'. This September feels eerily similar to every other recent September; I take pics of Red Necked Stints, I listen to construction noise (they still haven't finished that stupid new house next door), I watch England play surprisingly well and Liverpool start poorly.............or maybe I'm in a coma and this is some kind of mental limbo like 'Life on Mars'

There weren't as many Mongolian Plovers as this last year though.........

A pretty cute bird even when eating worms...............

A slow wader day today, although I did meet someone who said he'd seen a Curlew Sandpiper a few miles up the beach (a bird not on my Hakodate list yet).

Apart from the above Plover the only shorebirds I saw were 1 Grey Tailed Tattler, 1 Common Sandpiper and 3 Red Necked Stint.

They foraged around in the flotsam eating various bugs and wormy type things.

In previous years wader passage generally peaked in the second week of September but maybe the hot weather this year is playing havoc with migration patterns. It wasn't so hot this week (only about 27 or 28 today) and the nights have become tolerably comfortable ast last.

Other stuff around included Night Heron, Kingfisher and this Great Egret.

Nearer home Asian Brown Flycatcher and Eastern Crowned Warbler have been passing through.

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

September 7th 2008.


Wood Sandpiper on one of the local beaches just east of Hakodate. It was sharing the beach with a couple of Lesser Sand Plovers. An odd bird to see on the beach, I usually see them in ricefields or at least a little inland..............

Moving swiftly on.................

A Pacific Swift up near Oshamanbe this afternoon. There were lots of swifts and hirundines flying south and I tried photographing swifts semi-seriously for the first time.

It was hard.

Some heavy cropping going on here.

In amongst the Pacific Swifts were smaller numbers of White Throated Needletails.

We were at Oshamanbe to check out the waders.

The bird on the left is a Red Knot, the one on the right is the very common Grey Tailed Tattler. Red Knot is a fairly scarce species in Japan and this is a new addition to my Japanese list.

There were other wader species around too; Mongolian Plover, Whimbrel, Sanderling, Greenshank, Common Sandpiper and Ruddy Turnstone. Here's a photo of the latter.

And of course the inevitable Red Necked Stints, they were everywhere in small skittish flocks.

This individual appeared to be colour ringed.

Other species today included the first Glaucous Winged Gull of 'winter', Great Egret, Japanese Green Pigeon, Night Heron, Sand Martin, Eastern Marsh Harrier and this young Peregrine.

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Still hot, when will it end?

No footy on tonight. How boring................

Hottest ever......

Well it's officially the hottest summer in Japan since records began. It was too hot for any birding the last few days plus on my only day off it rained all day.

This morning I got up early to watch England beat Bulgaria 4-0 (!) and took advantage of the fact I was up early to go to Kamiiso before the temperature started rising.

We just missed this Osprey diving and catching a fish. I did well to jump out of the car, get my camera and get any shots at all actually. This one could have been a real keeper if it been in focus.............

Dunno what kind of fish it was................

Not much else about, several Common Sandpiper, lots of Night Heron still, a lone Greenshank and 5 or 6 Red Necked Stint on the beach.

Truth be told I'm tired of the hot weather but it's set to continue for a while apparently. At least when we go out in the car it has aircon.............

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More Waders #3

A Greenshank on the beach at Kamiiso this morning. It was uncomfortably hot again today, I got heat rash and sunburn and gave up around midday..............it's now late evening and there is a spectacular thunderstorm going on outside.

The Greenshank was the most interesting species, I don't see them so often in Hakodate (they're common elsewhere near here, especially Yakumo).

I was mostly shooting into the sun so not a vintage day for pictures.

There was a group of 3 Ruddy Turnstones pecking around some weird green thing on the beach.

The 5 Terek Sandpiper were still around and still very shy, the Red Necked Stint flock fell from 21 yesterday to only 11 today. Lots of Night Herons and also the inevitable Ospreys........

So that should be about that for August, I can't recall a hotter month in the 10 summers I've been in Hokkaido. Although the storm has cooled things down a bit the forecast still says around 30 degrees tomorrow...................roll on autumn.

Still, this hot as hell weather means I feel less guilty cracking open a cold beer in the evening. In fact I think I'll go the fridge right now.

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