2012 Best Of

Well what a funny old year that was. A ridiculous amount of snow from January right through to the end of March followed by the hottest summer in Hokkaido for over 100 years.........................

Anyway here is a random selection of 30 or so of my favourite shots from the last 12 months.

 The eagles showed well at Yakumo in early January but then 2 things happened. The snow came. Lots and lots of it. This made getting around tricky. Then the eagles all seemed to disappear.....................by February there were none at all. Strange. Must have been a poor salmon run I guess.

The Ural Owl at Onuma showed well too.

Sadly this dead  tree with the nice Owl hole has fallen down.................let's hope the Owl wasn't in when it happened.

There was a big invasion of Rough Legged Buzzards into south Hokkaido last winter, this had long been a bogey species for me but I saw them in 3 different locations. This very tame one was just outsisde Hakodate.

See how cold this egret looks..............

The cold winter meant very few small birds around. No waxwings, no winter finches. Nothing really except for the common residents.

Not many birds in the ports either, grebes were very scarce................

This injured Red Throated Diver was in Kamiiso.

I finally got acceptable shots of these 2 species, Black Scoter and Smew.................

And another target had been a male Black Woodpecker.....................

Here are 2 very different images of Red Foxes.

Spring and summer were a little quiet, we did a big camping trip around Hokkaido but I seemed to miss out on good photo opps. Nearer home there were a lot of Narcissus Flycatchers in the local park..............

Otherwise it was just common stuff..............

Ospreys seemed commoner than ever this summer....................

A pretty quiet wader season (both spring and autumn), only common species but there were some nice tame individuals on the local beaches.............

Only 4 new additions to my Japan list and even less to my Hakodate list, a bit of a letdown after a very good 2011 on both counts. Still a few fairly common species missing from both so I'm sure I'll knock some of them off next year.

Thank you for reading this blog and please come back in 2013..............

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