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

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.