So that was January then

So that was January then and what a cold snowy month it's been........

Another trip to Yakumo yesterday to see the eagles, this time with Tomohiro (thanks for the driving!)................and again we were thwarted by blizzards. It was slightly better than last Friday though, indeed for the first 10 minutes it looked very promising indeed.

I messed up the settings a little with this BIF, I should have set a higher shutter speed. There were quite a few eagles downstream again including this very tame male White Tailed Eagle.

It was looking good, like I said lots of eagles in the trees...........

And then the blizzard started. This Stellers Sea Eagle was very close but in between it and the camera were rather a lot of falling snowflakes.

We headed back south to Sawara to check for the Snow Buntings that are overwintering there. This would be a new one for my Japanese list (I've seen them in the UK). Unfortunately the snow was so deep and the wind so cold we gave up after a few minutes and headed down to Shikabe the check the ports. There were some interesting birds around (Harlequin Duck, Black Necked Grebe etc) but nothing close enough to photograph so we ended up back at Onuma which had avoided the blizzards and was nice and sunny.

The tame Tits and Nuthatches obliged as per usual.

The Snow Bunting would have been #250 on my Japanese list. On the way back we stopped off at a place where a Great Grey Shrike had been seen a couple of weeks ago, of course it wasn't there, another chance too hit 250 scuppered...............again a species I haven't seen in Japan (but I have in the UK).

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I just started watching 'This is England 86' which seems pretty good so far, after that I have 'Red Riding' to work through as well as a weekly dose of 'Shameless'. Chasing Snow Buntings and Great Grey Shrikes and watching these kinds of TV shows: it hardly feels like I'm abroad sometimes.

Hakodate's gone all Bohemian

Part of a flock of Bohemian Waxwing in Hakodate this afternoon. The Japanese Waxwing flocks seem to have moved on and their more Bohemian cousins have now arrived. It was late in the day but there was a gap in the blizzards meaning I could fire off some shots.

Some of these shots are hardly even cropped and sometimes I had to zoom out to fit the birds in the frame. I guess they had just arrived in town and were too hungry to be wary. They were pretty tame and these photos were taken on a busy street. There were probably about 40 or so birds in the flock. Shame about the poor light though.........

They were drinking snow from the rooftops of the nearby houses..........

There were a couple of Japanese Waxwings mixed in with the flock, you can see one on the far left and another one towards the back.

They came down en masse to some person's garden..................

Quite a sight. They come about 3 out of every 4 winters. Last year there were no Waxwings of either species but already this winter both species have arrived in some numbers. The last time this happened was in 2006 (or was it 2007?) when there were loads of them everywhere right up until the end of March. Hope this year will be the same..............

I couldn't nail any action shots, too dark..........

I had been up in Yakumo in the morning with a friend, there were reasonable numbers of eagles but the weather was terrible. A complete whiteout meaning zero photo opps and we could hardly even get out of the car.....................

This is a male Bullfinch in Hakodate a couple of days ago on a rare sunny day.........

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On this day (January 28th).....................

January 28th 2009.

This Spectacled Guillemot was a nice find in Hakodate, some of this series of photos appeared on TV and another even won me a ¥100,000 prize................

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#200 sneaks up quietly

A couple of nice sunny days in Hakodate this week. Yesterday I headed back to Nanaehama to see if the 2 Lapland Buntings were present and indeed they were as you can see from the photos above.

I tried crouching down on the beach, a mistake as it led to pain radiating down my sciatic nerve, my back is still knackered I'm sad to say. I can still only walk at half speed but this isn't such a problem in the snow and ice as everyone walks slowly.............

I noticed flocks of Black Scoter offshore giving their eerie cries, I didn't have any binoculars with me so I checked them through my camera. One or 2 of them looked a bit odd so I took some shots and lo and behold when I came back and checked on the computer there were 2 female White Winged Scoters amongst them.................a local tick and #200 on my Hakodate list.

I walked down to Kamiiso (very slowly), on the way were some Wigeon and Brent Geese........

In the harbour at Kamiiso were a few common species including Scaup, Goldeneye, Pelagic and Temincks Cormorant as well as several Goosander..........

Offshore were big rafts of Red Breasted Merganser and a few Great Crested Grebes too. Other noteworthy species included Glaucous and Glaucous Winged Gull, Great Egret and Whooper Swan.

On the way back from the train window I noticed a Grey Goose dozing in the river, from its size it was probably a White Fronted Goose (which I sometimes see in town) but if I go back next week and it turns out to be a Bean Goose that'll be #201....................

Not much near my flat recently, a Black Faced Bunting and Oriental Turtle Dove (2 species I normally don't see in winter) were around today as were Wren, Coal Tit and Hawfinch plus the usual common winter stuff.

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Another Sunday with the eagles............

A Stellers Sea Eagle at Yakumo this afternoon............

Today didn't start off so well. We got up very early and headed off to Onuma, god it was cold there..........

But beautiful as it was there were no birds about. No Swans, even the place where the tame Tits and Nuthatches hang out is buried under snow..............

So we headed up to Yakumo, not much there either at first. A few eagles but nothing posing for the camera. At Oshamanbe the Long Tailed Ducks weren't in the harbour and a distant buteo species may have been a Rough Legged but probably wasn't................

We arrived back in Yakumo about 3pm and got luckier..............

This eagle was in exactly the same spot as another eagle 4 years ago.............

I missed a couple of great BIF opps because the camera was on tripod and I was using liveview/manual focus.

The above shot was with a 1.4 Teleconverter, this one was without...........

It flapped down into the river to eat a salmon carcass..............no teleconverter attached here.

One reason I messed up these shots a little was that I was trying to make a video. I'm not really cut out for this, I missed it crapping and calling in the tree and guzzling the salmon in the river. I did however manage to put this together...............

Owashi 2011 Part 1 from Stuart Price on Vimeo.

Apologies for the sound quality.

This individual was perched right next to the road.............

As you can see it has a damaged (or deformed?) bill........

Earlier in the day I got a few shots of White Tailed Eagles, the 2 adults perched here look a little weedy...........

And this young one was the only halfway decent BIF shot of the day............

And to finish here is a picture of a humble Slaty Backed Gull.

This species was apparently recorded in the UK for the first time last week and provoked quite some debate as to whether it was a hybrid or not. I got a lot of hits on this blog after a reader kindly linked me on a thread discussing the bird on question over on birdforum (thanks to Zac for that).

I posted a few pics of the local Gulls and the next morning I got an e-mail from none other then Lee Evans requesting some more pictures of Slaty Backed and Vega Gulls (folk seem to think it may be a hybrid/intergrade of the two). He even put some of my shots on his UK400 Club website and mentioned me by name. So that's my 15 milliseconds of birding fame been and gone then..........

I had no idea some people think Vega and Slaty Backed may be one species, the Gull situation is so complicated these days. There are lots of odd looking Vega Gulls around that may be intergardes with Heuglins and let's not even start to mention American Herring, Mongolian or any of the many other splits that occur in Japan. 

I'll leave that to others to sort out.........

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