Travelling light

My battered old 100-400 MK1 is so full of dust and also suffering from various other ailments that it has been sent off to the Canon service centre for an insurance quote...........

The 500 f4 is too heavy and too attention drawing to carry around town. So today I walked around near my flat with the Canon PowerShot SX50 HS...........hmmmm.............

Some Peregrines............

We were out west yesterday................

Curlew Sandpiper

A Curlew Sandpiper in the ricefields near Hakodate this afternoon..............

Wood Sandpipers

A windy (from the wrong direction) Sunday afternoon was pretty quiet birdwise..............

Stilts in the gloom

There were 3 Black Winged Stilts near Yakumo as we headed home on Tuesday.................

A grey morning by a lake

We stopped by Lake Toya on the way back from our trip..............

More visitors to the pool

 About a dozen species visted the small pool in the forest...............

Grey Bunting

A male Grey Bunting at the forest pool from our recent trip.

This is another shy forest species that I rarely get the chance to photograph....................

Japanese Thrush

I just got back from a short trip.................

Miiscellaneous

An Eastern Crowned Warbler at Onuma earlier in the week.

From April 29th to May 5th I had a lot of time off and it was all pretty hectic birdingwise and I updated my blog a lot, here's some of the other stuff I photographed in that time............

It's raining Spoonbills.......

Amazingly, a different Spoonbill appeared on Thursday............the third of the week.

More Ospreys

I went back to the place out west where I'd seen the Ospreys fishing a couple of weeks ago..........

Some passage waders

It was raining this morning and one of the flooded muddy fields to the north of town had some waders................

2 species of Spoonbill!

On Tuesday afternoon I was very surprised to find both east Asian Spoonbill species on a beach to the west of town.....................

Ujihodai #2

Some more common local species feeding on the maggots and insects in the rotting seafood detritus last Saturday.................

Japanese Robin

A male Japanese Robin to the north of Hakodate, a bird I'd never photographed before..............until this Tuesday morning.

Ujihodai #1

Some shots from Yakumo last Saturday................

Monday morning blues

A male Blue and White Flycatcher and a male Narcissus Flycatcher, 2 of the most striking summer visitors to Hokkaido.

We were on the east coast early in the morning (where these 2 photos were taken) and Onuma this afternoon. The forests were full of summer migrants............in addition to the above 2 species there were loads of Eastern Crowned Warbler and Japanese Thrush singing. Brown Thrush, Japanese Robin and Asian Stubtail were also around..............it was the start of another long days birding.

Some April waders.........

Only a few passage waders around, so here is a summer visitor and a winter visitor from Sunday.............

Saunders Gull

It's the time of year when rarities often appear and yesterday I found one. Well, a local rarity.