Christmas in Onuma

A female Black Woodpecker at Onuma late this afternoon. It was another cold day, lots of snow on Christmas Eve but this afternoon te sun came out.

The Woodpecker was pretty tame and kept on feeding whilst I took lots of photos, most of which looked very similar. It was quite hard, it was usually against the light, at a bad angle and constantly moving. This was the most interesting pose.

But the other shots are very samey. 

Somebody had left out lots of food for the tits and nuthatches so they weren't especially tame and I couldn't get any decent shots of them in the snow.

2 Bean Geese had joined the small flock of Whooper Swans..........

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2011 best of

A random selection of my fave shots from the last year.........

Thanks to all the regular readers of this blog. Festive greetings whatever your religion and I hope you all have a good 2012.....

More blizzards

More blizzards today and this morning saw an aborted trip to Yakumo, we eventually made it as far as Onuma. the tame Tits and Nuthatches were around but it was too dark for any photos.

Are those birds above Marsh or Willow Tits? I suspect the former but I may be wrong. I read somewhere that Marsh are dominant over Willow and some individuals seemed to be bullying others............are both species present? I've always assumed I'd been watching Marsh Tits at Onuma, one of many resolutions for 2012 will be to sort that one out. the Marsh and Willow Tits here are slightly different races from the ones in the UK and are harder to tell apart (their voices are much mor similar for example).

Not much else in the gloom........Black Woodpecker and White Tailed Eagle were both around but no photos.

At Ono there were lots of Rooks feeding in the snowy fields and in the harbour at Kamiiso there were several species sheltering from the weather. The most interesting was a flock of 80 or so Black Necked Grebes.

Also present were 3 Great Crested Grebe, several Goldeneye, Red Breasted Merganser and Scaup.

In town last week there were Grey Starling, Brown Dipper, Dusky Thrush, Great Egret and Daurian Redstart.............the usual winter species.

Looks like the long weekend here will be buried in snow, I'm itching to get back up to Yakumo but not in this weather. We saw the aftermath of another road accident today (I make that 6 on our last 3 outings). This one didn't look serious but the nasty one we saw earlier in the week we later found out had been a fatal one...........

Oh well, it gives me an excuse to get heavily drunk and have a few lie-ins.

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