Waxwings #1

Yesterday there was a flock of 20 or so Bohemian Waxwings in the small park round the back of my apartment. Usually they are up in the trees but not this time, they were feeding on the fallen berries on the ground..............

I managed to get some nice group shots.

There were other birds in the park: a flock of 10 or so Siskin, a few Brambling and Dusky Thrush and a White Tailed Eagle even flew high overhead. But I was concentrating on the Waxwings..........

I did get a few perched shots too.......

And sometimes in the odd remaining piles of snow..........

The Waxwings provided a couple of hours when I could forget all the turmoil in Japan. I almost feel guilty for taking photos of birds and posting them on the internet whilst only a couple of hundreds of miles away survivors of the tsunami are grief-stricken cold and hungry. Blogging about birds seems so trivial. The news from Fukushima seems to have knocked the tsunami out of the news, what a tragedy that the world isn't thinking so much about those survivors anymore, the whole families and villages lost forever. Those small fishing towns that were destroyed are exactly the same as Shikabe, Yakumo, Sawara etc, the towns I spend a lot of my time in when I'm out taking photos. If the quake had been 200 or 300KM further north those small towns may have become as well known to the world as those of Miamisanriku and Kesennuma.

It's hard to gauge what's really happening down there at the power plant, my Japanese isn't good enough to follow the news broadcast word for word so I'm also relying on the international media. The Japanese media seems to be underplaying the situation down in Fukushima whilst the foreign media seem to looking for the most sensational story, at the moment I'm of the opinion that it's too far away to be a health problem for us here in Hakodate but the government/electrical company isn't telling us everything, they don't seem to be in any control whatsoever of the situation. If I was living further down south and nearer the plant with no trains and no gasoline and relying on the Japanese government and electrical companies for info I think I'd be tearing my hair out and suffering my own personal meltdown.

The emperor addressed the nation today, an unprecedented act. I really hope there is no mass panic down in Tokyo as I think the government would completely lose control. It won't come to that I'm sure but FFS sort out that power station quickly please.

I took a lot of Waxwing pics, I'll post some more presently........