As the first light angled across the coastal pools the first thing I saw, apart from hundreds of ducks, was a party of Long-billed Dowitchers in the far corner. I hurried round but a beautiful male Northern Goshawk dashed across the pool arriving long before me. It perched on a telegraph pole close to the Dowitchers and not surprisingly by the time I got there they'd moved much further out and I could only get these rather poor digiscoped shots. Of course the Goshawk, job done, also flew off before I got there.
The next pool held an even bigger surprise with two late Wood Sandpipers and a Spotted Redshank!
Birding was good, a wide range of species, with plenty of local specialities hard to see elsewhere in Kansai - at least in the same place. Saunders Gulls were quite common over pools and mudflats, Oystercatchers and big numbers of sea ducks off-shore.
There were several Buff-bellied Pipits but these shots were of two birds I saw a day earlier on Saturday, one quite obviously bigger and darker than the other.
I'd covered most of my usual spots more quickly than I would have done during wader season so headed to the north of Tsu city which is better for some sea ducks and holds bigger numbers of large gulls. Driving through the back streets I took a wrong turn and ended up on the seawall earlier than I'd planned but this turned out to be an error that paid off. I scanned the off-shore ducks and almost immediately found four Black Scoters, three males and a female, but no sooner had I got onto them then they flew off. Had I not taken the wrong turn I'd never have seen this new bird for my Kansai list. I've always thought of Ise Bay as a likely place to find them but until last weekend had never had the luck. They're very common not much further up the Pacific coast but they don't quite come far enough down.
This was the icing on the cake and the first time I've been thankful for snow wrecking my plans. I could've gone home happy but I still wanted to check the gull beach. The clock gave me plenty of time to spare but the increasing cloud meant light was failing prematurely and by the time I parked and walked out onto the beach light was poor. Even worse there were no concentrations of gulls, just a dribble of odd ones along the kilometres of sand. There was a small cluster associated with a Cormorant flock sitting around an outfall further up the beach so I made may way up and sat in hope something would drop in. And before long it did. A gull that looked suspiciously like a first winter Caspian Gull Larus cachinnans cachinnans but that's going to be the subject of the next post.
List of birds seen:-
Green Pheasant 1
Gadwall common
Falcated Duck 50+, a low number
Eurasian Wigeon 1000s
Mallard 100s
Eastern Spot-billed Duck 50-100
Northern Shoveler c80
Northern Pintail common
Eurasian Teal surprisingly few, maybe 30
Common Pochard 1000s
Tufted Duck 100s
Greater Scaup 1000s
Black Scoter 4
Common Goldeneye 15-20
Smew 2
Red-breasted Merganser 20-30
Little Grebe several
Great Crested Grebe c20
Black-necked Grebe 60-80
Grey Heron c20
Great White Egret c20
Little Egret 10+
Great Cormorant 1000+
Eurasian Kestrel 1
Osprey c10
Black Kite 6-7
Northern Goshawk 2
Common Coot 5-10
Eurasian Oystercatcher 4
Black-winged Stilt 19
Grey Plover 42
Kentish Plover common
Common Snipe 8-10
Long-billed Dowitcher 5
Eurasian Curlew 1
Wood Sandpiper 2
Common Sandpiper c20
Sanderling common
Dunlin c400-500
Black-tailed Gull common
Common Gull c10
Vega Gull c300
Slaty-backed Gull 3
Heuglin's Gull 4
Black-headed Gull common
Saunder's Gull 20-30
Feral Rock Dove common
Oriental Turtle Dove several
Common Kingfisher 5
Bull-headed Shrike 2
Carrion Crow very common
Large-billed Crow fairly common
Japanese Skylark 2-3
Brown-eared Bulbul fairly common
White-cheeked Starling common
Dusky Thrush several
Daurian Redstart 6
Blue Rock Thrush 1
Eurasian Tree Sparrow fairly common
White Wagtail common
Japanese Wagtail 2
Olive-backed Pipit 5
Buff-bellied Pipit 5-6
Oriental Greenfinch common
Meadow Bunting 3-4 heard
Black-faced Bunting 1 heard
Reed Bunting 2
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