One week on..............

A Great Egret on the river near my apartment this morning.

It's one week since the earthquake. The unease regarding the Fukushima Power Plant, the grief and sadness after all those people died and the memories of those shocking scenes as the waves hit is shredding everyone's nerves.

Walking round the neighbourhood checking the birds takes my mind of such things. Slightly.

There have been 2 Great Egrets on the river for a while now. Normally they are very skittish and fly off as soon as they see me but today one of them ignored me and I could watch it fishing..........

It was only catching tiddlers............

It seemed to be shivering a lot. It must have been very hungry to have been bothering with such tiny fish...........

I've been hoping the Crossbills would be around but no sign of them anywhere. There are small flocks of Brambling, Hawfinch and Siskin................

And some Long Tailed Rosefinch...........a bird I can never get a decent shot of.

Also around are Little Grebe, Red Breasted Merganser, Goldeneye, Scaup, Coal Tit, Dusky Thrush and Daurian Redstart.

Let's hope the weekend brings some better news. The Power Plant under control and warmth, medicine and hot food for the survivors would be a good start.

Waxwings #2

Some more Waxwing shots from a couple of days ago. They have an odd way of feeding, it seems to involve swallowing the berries partially, spitting them out again and catching them mid air........

I used continuous shooting hoping to catch some more interesting facial expressions........

It's been a good winter for Waxwings, that's for sure..........

Everything is still very worrying here, every day I wake up hoping they've sorted out the nuclear plant only to find it is getting worse if anything. There are still small quakes several times a day too.

Although I have permanent residency here I still need a re-entry permit in my passport (if I don't I'd lose my residency status when I visit abroad), it ran out last month so I'm off to get a new one this afternoon. Better keep my options open although I doubt very much I'll need to flee. Still, a couple of weeks on a beach in Thailand whilst the situation here resolves itself would be very very appealing, shame I'm skint eh?

Waxwings #1

Yesterday there was a flock of 20 or so Bohemian Waxwings in the small park round the back of my apartment. Usually they are up in the trees but not this time, they were feeding on the fallen berries on the ground..............

I managed to get some nice group shots.

There were other birds in the park: a flock of 10 or so Siskin, a few Brambling and Dusky Thrush and a White Tailed Eagle even flew high overhead. But I was concentrating on the Waxwings..........

I did get a few perched shots too.......

And sometimes in the odd remaining piles of snow..........

The Waxwings provided a couple of hours when I could forget all the turmoil in Japan. I almost feel guilty for taking photos of birds and posting them on the internet whilst only a couple of hundreds of miles away survivors of the tsunami are grief-stricken cold and hungry. Blogging about birds seems so trivial. The news from Fukushima seems to have knocked the tsunami out of the news, what a tragedy that the world isn't thinking so much about those survivors anymore, the whole families and villages lost forever. Those small fishing towns that were destroyed are exactly the same as Shikabe, Yakumo, Sawara etc, the towns I spend a lot of my time in when I'm out taking photos. If the quake had been 200 or 300KM further north those small towns may have become as well known to the world as those of Miamisanriku and Kesennuma.

It's hard to gauge what's really happening down there at the power plant, my Japanese isn't good enough to follow the news broadcast word for word so I'm also relying on the international media. The Japanese media seems to be underplaying the situation down in Fukushima whilst the foreign media seem to looking for the most sensational story, at the moment I'm of the opinion that it's too far away to be a health problem for us here in Hakodate but the government/electrical company isn't telling us everything, they don't seem to be in any control whatsoever of the situation. If I was living further down south and nearer the plant with no trains and no gasoline and relying on the Japanese government and electrical companies for info I think I'd be tearing my hair out and suffering my own personal meltdown.

The emperor addressed the nation today, an unprecedented act. I really hope there is no mass panic down in Tokyo as I think the government would completely lose control. It won't come to that I'm sure but FFS sort out that power station quickly please.

I took a lot of Waxwing pics, I'll post some more presently........

On this day (March 15th).............

March 15th 2009.

Common Crossbill in Hakodate.

Male giving me a stare. Part of a big influx 2 years ago in Hakodate. This pic is only slightly cropped, they can be a surprisingly tame species sometimes...............

I'm not going out much at the moment, just not really in the mood what with everything going on just across the Tsugaru Straits. I have been checking this same area for Crossbills though and nothing doing there...........

Monday morning

A Japanese Pygmy Woodpecker yesterday at Onuma.

A weird surreal atmosphere at the moment, Hakodate seems to be normal if a little quiet. Only 1 person (AFAIK) died, he drowned in his apartment when the low lying area near the bay was flooded. As I said in my last post I was there 2 or 3 hours before. I was sitting on the edge of the harbour, feet dangling a few inches above the water whilst taking photos of the Black Necked Grebe.

When I got home I was taking a nap, the doorbell rang (it was the postman with a recorded delivery) and just as I was signing for the letter the quake hit. As the water started sloshing out of the fishtank I grabbed hold of it expecting the quake to peter out after a few seconds but it just kept going and going, I thought christ I should get out of the building here and put some clothes on and headed out of the door with the whole building swaying and creaking. It stopped as I was heading out of the door so I went back in and mopped up in the living room, a strong aftershock a few minutes later meant I was mopping up again soon. My wife called and said do NOT go near the sea. 

I switched on the TV and watched the local news, it had live footage of some ports in Hokkaido getting damaged but nothing too bad, it said the tsunami would hit Hakodate at 4.10pm (in about 20 minutes). At 4.10 they had a camera fixed on the low lying area in Hakodate Bay and it quickly filled with water, nothing too dramatic but a bit disconcerting. I thought well maybe this wasn't too bad after all. Then I turned in the national news to see what was happening elsewhere in Japan and I'm sure you've all seen how utterly shocking those pictures were.

If that wasn't bad enough now there are the nuclear issues. I used to live in Fukushima Prefecture, thank god I don't live there anymore. Up here we are far enough away (and the wind direction is helping too) for us presumably to be unaffected but it is pretty scary stuff, if I was living in Fukushima now I think I would be heading south ASAP. There are some nuclear power stations just across the straits from Hakodate in Aomori but I understand they are undamaged.

No food shortages so far up in Hokkaido but there were lines at some of the gas stations yesterday, hopefully that's just a few folk overreacting. The planned power outages shouldn't spread up here, at least I wouldn't have thought so. In Hokkaido we haven't really been directly affected by the quake/tsunami but obviously it isn't very far away at all (400 or 500 km away as the crow flies to Miyagi-ken) and many people here have friends/family in the affected area. My wife's friend lived in one of the coastal neighbourhoods in Sendai that was very badly hit, she has tried contacting her but hasn't heard anything back yet.

Thank you for all the messages expressing concern on the last post. I feel a bit sheepish, like I say we got off very lightly indeed here. Just a couple of very scary minutes when the quake hit and lingering unease over the nuclear issues, very very minor indeed compared to the horrors the people are facing further south.

We couldn't go near the coasts yesterday, the tsunami warnings were still in effect so we spent a couple of hours at Onuma feeding the Tits and Nuthatches.

Other stuff at Onuma included Smew, Goldeneye, Goosander, Great Egret, Grey Heron, White Tailed Eagle and Treecreeper.

Not much in Hakodate the last few days, just the usual common stuff. 2 Great Egrets on the river as well as 7 species of duck (including both Merganser species and a drake Shoveler), a flock of Brambling and this tame Oriental Turtle Dove.

Shaken

A Black Necked Grebe in Hakodate today. The EXIF data shows it was taken at around 11.30am, about 5 hours later this area was flooded as a result of the tsunami.

I was home at 2.46pm when the quake hit, it was pretty f**king scary. It lasted 3 or 4 minutes, the building was swaying, things were flying off shelves and water was sloshing out of the fish tank. I switched on the TV and watched the events unfold, wow what shocking images. 

There were several large aftershocks but it looks like Hakodate got off pretty lightly, it is a few hundred KM north of the epicenter and I live far enough from the coast not to panic.

The Back Necked Grebe seemed to have some kind of beak deformity. I've actually been looking for both Grebes and Crossbills this last week, this bird seems to tick both boxes.

There are at least 2 Great Egrets on the local river, they sometimes perch on the rooftops.

The Siskins are still around.

Today I finished off on the beach, a 'Tamiyr' type Gull was there.......note the yellwish legs.

This one had dark eyes, I thought it may have been a Thayers Gull but it isn't. It's just a Vega Gull I think, it had dark wingtips when it flew off.......

I had a couple of semi funny trivial flippant little incidents that happened this week I was going to write about but after the events today in Japan I don't really feel like it.

Ons of the people I sometimes go up to Yakumo with actually lives and works down near Sendai, I hope he's OK.