Tobias
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Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2010 21:59:05 +1000
Subject: [canberrabirds] Japanese Birding: Part 7 (The Last...)
Hi all,
I know I haven't been very regular with my bird updates from the Orient over the past couple of months. But I think one last message is due before I bring to a close the 10 months that I have spent birding and learning Japanese here in eastern Japan. Tomorrow, I leave for an adventure in SE Asia with a couple of school mates (non-birding, I might add) before I return Down Under to rediscover Australian birding in the New Year. I hear that Canberra has at last had some decent spring rains and as such I hope that the breeding this season will be exceptional. I cannot wait to return to 'my' small patch in Cooleman Ridge, hopefully that too is thriving.
October has been a surprisingly busy month for me, and together with the end of September, one of the most fulfilling times of the trip so far. In addition to a very beautifully scenic trip to Nikko in the mountains, I've also been many times to see the waders, birded at 3000m, and also sat and watched as many tens of migrating flycatchers came to drink at a waterbath. For me, the birding highlight was a trip to a small island called Tobishima, positioned in the Sea of Japan, off the west coast of Yamagata-ken. In Japan, every spring and autumn birders from around the country converge on an number of small islands off the western coast of Japan and spend a weekend or so trying to find some rare migrants or even some mega rarities blown off their normal course. A day on Tobishima ran something like this:
"A 5:30am start in order to put in a good 2 hours before brekky. Walk 20 minutes to the local primary school oval and check whether any rare migrants have turned up overnight. Other birders are bound to turn up, so now is also a good time to check whether anyone has found any mega rarities this early in the morning. Return back to the minshuku for a breakfast of fish, seafood and seaweed. And some more fish. Oh, and some rice. Then off to the vege gardens in the middle of the island where, come noon, many elderly women are working on their patches. Here, check for any rare flycatchers, scan the persimmon trees for thrushes and wait beside every single bush (and there were many!) waiting for any warbler other than an Arctic. Once you are bored of that, move on to the small stand of persimmon trees and wait for a rare species of White-eye (Chestnut-flanked White-eye) and converse with the other birders that are surely waiting there also, on what the best birds of the day have been so far. Here, once it appears that the White-eye is not going to come, sit down and have the packed lunch of riceballs and fish packed by the host of the minshuku. After that is finished and it is obvious that the White-eye has now moved on, you then walk back to the northern side of the island, pausing to spend an hour or two searching near some sort of a dumping place for unused earth, making sure to avoid the massive earth-mover that takes up the whole road. Once all of the birds have flown off, you head off to the Heliport and stand and wait for the hundreds of buntings to fly up from amongst the tallish grasses. Then, after once again picking up the latest news and bragging about all the rarities you saw, it is then time to head back to where the day started: at the schoolyard and round out the day peering into the approaching darkness for some sign of a tiny wagtail that never actually appears."
Nearly every single day, 6 in total, was spent on a routine similar to that. Of course, it varied somewhat if a rare bird was spotted on the other side of the island, but by and large, it was very much the same every day. And there were rare birds. Everyday. Any day that you didn't see a slightly rare or uncommon day was a bad day. I won't bore you with the names of all the birds we saw, as most of them probably won't mean much to most people on the email-list, but for those of you who want to the know the particulars, I have a list of the birds I saw on Tobishima that week (at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/callocephalon/5082327307/ ). This island birding was immensely fun, and unfortunately something that we don't have in Australia.
I had better move on from this computer otherwise I will never make it to SE Asia. I really look forward to birding with list members next year and I am really excited to be returning home in the New Year. Nothing like a bit of good ol' bushbirding. And I need to get myself on a proper pelagic trip!!!
Well then, I shall leave it here. Hopefully some people got a bit out of these (at times rambling) accounts of the different birding here in Japan. See you all in the New Year!
Cheers
Tobias
PS Not my best photo, but in the spirit of recent sightings off Ashmore Reef, here is a Grey-streaked Flycatcher :) It is actually really interesting to read about some of the vagrants that they get off NW Australia, and often times it involves species seen here in Japan -- recently, Grey-streaked Flycatcher, Dark-sided Flycatcher, Middendorff's Grasshopper Warbler, Arctic Warbler and historically species like Narcissus Flycatcher, Blue-and-White Flycatcher etc.
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