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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