Black Woodpecker #2

...........continued form yesterday.

It was crystal clear at Onuma and here's 2 familiar views of Mt Komagadake.






The female Black Woodpecker posed beautifully agianst the clear blue sky. Naturally I fired off lots of shots at various focal lengths/settings and ended up with about 200 reasonanly good shots that all look the same.

These selected are really no better or worse than the dozens of others on my hard drive.







There were other Woodpeckers around. 5 species at Onuma and we saw 4 of them today. The two most numerous are Japanese Pygmy and Great Spotted. Here's a shot of the latter.



No Nuthatch shots yesterday (though there were plenty around) as i was concentrating on the Black Woodpecker........but here's Marsh Tit instead.



We headed back to Hakodate in the afternoon and I took a walk in Shiki no Mori, a park in the northern part of town. I've seen some good birds here before but yesterday it was extremely quiet.........a few Jay and Nuthatch plus I heard some Crossbill somewhere off in the forest. We finished the day off at Kamiso. I haven't done much seawatching at all this winter so I dusted off the scope and scanned the waves. The usual seaduck were bobbing up and down offshore as weel as Great Crested and Red Necked Grebes. There were also several Glaucous Gull of various ages on the beach. This is a common passage visitor in late winter/early spring. Here's a coupls of shots of a 2nd winter bird with some of the more regular species in the background.





The sunset at Kamiso just before we went home.



So 2 weeks today I fly to England. It'll be my first visit home for over 3 years. At the moment the agenda consists of a trip to York, Hadrian's Wall plus a night in the Lakes, an Indian restaurant or 2, a night or 2 in my old local, some birding on my old local patch (the Ribble at Penwortham/Longton), perhaps a trip to Marshside or Leighton Moss...........