Views from a bridge

A real rarity today: blue skies and sunny weather in Yakumo.............

The eagles are still around, they have moved downstream and are now squabbling over the remaining food supplies, I fired off this sequence of shots of one swooping down...........

See that delicious looking salmon head in the bottom right hand corner?

I should have maybe used a faster shutter speed for these shots but I was glad I persevered over an hour on the bridge, waiting for one of them to actually do something.......

The above sequence was taken from the bridge on Route 5, usually the birds are a long way away like this.

But I got slightly luckier with this Stellers Sea Eagle........

You can see another 3 eagles in the background of this one.................

In east Hokkaido of course it is possible to get much closer to the eagles, in Yakumo with a 400mm lens and cropped pics this is the best it gets really. These BIF shots further upstream were all pretty close however and didn't need much cropping at all...........

And here's the obligatory one in a tree..........

We stopped briefly in Onuma in the morning, there seemed to be more birds around than before...........the most interesting birds being a small flock of Crossbills. They stayed high in the trees before flying off so no photos. This species was very common near my apartment in late winter/spring in both 2008 and 2009 and I took lots of photos of them. Hopefully some will arrive in Hakodate later in the week..........

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