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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A brief interlude of nice weather

Another trip up to Yakumo today, lots of eagles and OMG some sunshine at last. Well, sometimes it stopped snowing.

The snow was pretty deep, twice I floundered in snow drifts and my wife had to rescue the camera (I needed 2 hands to pull myself out).

Lots of eagles feeding on salmon but very hard to get a good shot, they just fly away as soon as they catch your eye. Some were in the trees but were obscured by branches.

There were lots of birds like this.........

But they see me and do this...............

So lots of BIFs again, and some even in a blue sky.

This one is uncropped, the immature White tailed Eagles always seem to be the least shy......

This immature Stellers flew right over my head.........

I really wanted some close up shots of birds in the river, I guess for this you need a lot of time and patience and unfortunately we had not enough of the former today. There were some in the trees at least...........

The weather close in again later and some of the BIF shots suffered........

Whilst waiting in vain for some eagles to come back to the salmon carcass I got a crappy record shot of this bird.

A Crested Kingfisher, a bit of a Yakumo specialty and one I often see but this is the first photo i've ever posted of one..........

Other stuff around at Yakumo included Peregrine, Goshawk, Brown Dipper, Japanese Wagtail, Whooper Swan and various common ducks.

At Onuma in the morning not much around bird-wise, here's  Red Fox on the frozen lake.

On the way back we got stuck in a traffic jam caused by an accident, I saw three smashed up cars today in various places. The last one didn't look good, a head on collision with a truck, I hope the driver(s) survived. I didn't see the impact but it was only 100 or so metres ahead of us. The roads were pretty nasty today.

Hope North Korea doesn't let off the nukes, that would be a bad end to the year.

Kim Jong-il, Bin Laden and Gadaffi dead. 2011-the year of the dead power crazed dictator. Oh I forgot to add Steve Jobs to that list.

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