I walked down to Irifune Port today to see the Brent Geese. They usually depart at the end of March but they were still present today. About 30 all in all.
It was a nice day for it, very springlike. As winter finishes Oyaji Noise Season begins.This is the time of the year when the City Hall has to spend the remainder of its construction budget meaning scores of noisy probably pointless projects are taking place across town.
The Brent Geese were pretty noisy too and were honking and squabbling away.
I took a lot of video clips, I filled a 16GB card in fact..........here's a little compilation I made.
They are a very photogenic bird (even if the exposure can be a tad tricky).
I changed the colour profile on my camera to Adobe RGB (instead of sRGB). This is supposedly so I can make better prints. It might mean that if you're looking at these photos on certain browsers the colour may be a little muted. If it is that means I f**ked up something on the way from my camera via Canon DPP to Photoshop. Let me know if it that is the case. I looked it up on several sites but too be honest it was a little above my head and my eyes are tired and now I just want to relax and open a cold beer.
Not much else around. A Black Necked Grebe in full summer plumage, groups of Red Breasted Merganser, a few Scaup, Pelagic Cormorant and so on. In town it's been very quiet. Still lots of Hawfinch and Dusky Thrush, a lone Coot has been on the river the last 3 days and a male Kestrel flew over on Sunday. The latter 2 species are much rarer here than in the UK.
There were also lots of Harlequin Ducks today but they were a bit far away for a decent shot.
Liverpool were abject again against Man U. Torres was doing Heskey impressions in the 2nd half, Gerard has stopped caring, bar a couple of others the rest of the team isn't good enough and Benitez is sitting pretty on a huge contract that makes him unsackable.
I saw 'Avatar'. Nice looking film with a bit of a crap story. Not in 3D though (Hakodate doesn't have a 3D cinema). I'll watch last night's 'Shameless' in a minute...........
Please click this ranking link if you have the time. It won't do anything to your computer but it will make me appear slightly more popular in the Japanese birding blogging community. So it's got to be worth it.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteWow what a long post, you did almost better than I did ;-)
it is a pretty nice one to.. So the brent geese are heading over here soon. Still did not seen any here.... They are quite good for nice pictures and I did not see this mute tone you were talking about, at least with firefox... Well done on the harlequin, i love your shot even if it was heavily cropped...
As to Liverpool, sorry man, but sometime they get a bad year and it seems to be it.. They still have the Europa league.
Done for the link, you are getting better ranked now ;-)
Despite you thinking Liverpool aren't doing too well they are still, as usual unforunately, higher up the league than Everton. You might like Man City 0 - Everton 1 but that's only half time 45 minutes to go. A result for Everton would certainly help the Reds.
ReplyDeleteExcellent brent shots btw have you a very long lens or are they far more confiding your end of the continental land mass?
Cheers
Davo
Hi Chris, yes it's been a bad season. Like you say, s**t happens though.
ReplyDeleteHi Davo, yes some good results last night but I still can't see us getting 4th. Next up is Sunderland, got 0-0 written all over it.
I only use a 100-400 lens. The birds seem to be more approachable here, dunno why. Japan is more densely populated than the UK (though that's not the case in Hokkaido). These Brent Geese were only about 10 or so metres away which does seem unusually tame, they also hang around in fishing harbours so perhaps they are more used to people. The only ones I ever saw in the UK were in a distant skittish flock in the middle of a very very muddy field in Suffolk.
Lovely pics of the geese. Peaceful. I always have my cameras set to Adobe RGB and try to remember changing the settings to RGB if want to upload to a website. I clicked on the blog ranking thing for you. Sorry, I didn't know what that was before. I'll do the same when I visit again. Check out my new sitemeter at the bottom of my blog when you have the time! *most of the visits are from me) It's interesting though I don't think accurate.
ReplyDeleteDon't apologise for Harlequin. They look OK from where I am standing. Brent too, dont ever see them like that. Nice shots.
ReplyDeleteLots of great shots from the species again!
ReplyDeleteI laughed when I saw the shot with the tongue.
I also notice that the color here is a little bit muted comparing to your previous photos, but I think I know less camera functions than you do hehehe.