Bewick's, Whistling and Whooper Swans at Lake Biwa

I visited Lake Biwa for the first time this year at the weekend, twice in fact. Friday was sunny and Sunday was not, which is why the nominate columbianus images are so much duller.


A lot of people were on the fields (not just the Steller's Sea Eagle spot) because of the two local rares; both Whooper Swan and Cackling Goose were new Kansai birds for me. The Cackling Goose was the bigger draw and this made finding it relatively easy. Flocks of swans were dotted over a huge area but the Cackling Goose flock always had a line of roadside birders flagging the spot across the flat expanse between the Lake and the mountains.

I'd normally try to creep the car towards the flock hoping not to disturb the birds but it seems I've always erred on the side of caution because the swans simply don't give a hoot. The birds were even closer on Friday and actually walked towards the line of photographers with the closest coming to only 10 metres.

The main draw for me was the Cackling Goose and in fact I hadn't known about the Whooper Swans. It was only when the Cackler moved slightly back into the flock that I checked the birds in the next field down the road and discovered two of the white shapes were Whoopers. Whooper Swans are never common this far south in Japan, I've seen one further west in Shimane Prefecture and another at Arasaki in southern Kyushu(!) but this pair were a real surprise. I walked along and could get reasonably good shots, probably the best I've ever had of Whooper, despite all the geese and swans in this field being less close to the road.

After looking at large numbers of close range Tundra I was surprised how strikingly pale-eyed this bird was. According to Brazil (who ought to know) paler blue-grey eyes are not uncommon in Whooper Swans so this was a nice example.

This, dare I say rather smug-looking, Tundra's eye is also blue-grey though much duller.

So if I'm already anthropomorphising then it's safe to say I'd rather buy a used car from this bird. Oh, and this has the more usual dark eye. 

Sunday was much duller and colder with an increasing wind; the beginning of the end of a few days mild weather. I didn't hang around long enough to see if this Whistling Swan would come any closer so these are the best shots I could manage.

The above bird in the foreground and there's another possible columbianus behind it. I suppose this extent of yellow on the bill falls within the range of the nominate subspecies and I sometimes see birds like this paired with classic-looking columbianus, never with bewickii, which tends to support they are also Whistling Swans but eliminating the possibility of hybrid ancestry is impossible.

I suspect it's more likely to be Whistling than Bewick's. As I said I've seen such birds paired with clear-cut columbianus, with young, but never with bewickii.

Thanks to there being numerous small flocks dotted around a large area there was relatively frequent coming and going and plenty of opportunity for getting the prefect flight shots. I was far more interested in the two rarities but couldn't resist trying my hand at flying swans. The shot below was my best effort.

The other swans of interest were two birds with solar powered geolocators; I saw one on Friday, two on Sunday. Add those sightings to only seeing the Whoopers on Friday and Whistling Swans on Monday and it shows how difficult it is to see everything on a single visit. There must still be additional fields I've yet to find that are attracting flocks.

The 'Friday swan' getting a power boost.

Redpolls

Though Redpolls aren't rare in Japan their occurrence definitely has a northern bias. I've only once seen a small wintering flock in the western part of the country so I was keen to try for a party of eight in Kanazawa. I like to think of Kanazawa as an outpost of northern Japan within easy driving distance of Kyoto. I say easy driving distance even though some might think a 260km drive to see Redpolls a tad excessive, but you have to bear in mind there's such good general birding to be had in the Kanazawa area that a day or two up there is never boring.


My good friends in the met office informed me Tuesday would be mainly sunny with the odd shower but that the weather would go steeply downhill there after; a misearable amount of rain on the Wednesday followed by a depressing quantity the following day. Why do I even bother to check what cocktail of conditions they pull from the lucky-dip forecast hat? In the event Tuesday was so overcast (with frequent showers) that I was unsure whether the sun rose at all that day. The next day was blue skies all the way. I didn't wait around to find out how inaccurate the third day prediction might have been.


So if the following images all look as though they were taken pre-sunrise on very high ISO, they may as well have been.

I found seven Redpolls without difficulty. This midday image shows how dull the conditions were, the following shots are all significantly lightened.

Tundra Swan in the early afternoon glow.

Slavionian Grebe: a bird that I rarely see in Kansai. I was due a spot of luck on this trip and finding this to be the closest bird on a huge lake must have been it.

On any other day that flock of Black-necked Grebes in the background would have been closer than a just identifiable Slavonian in the distance.

One of several Brown Dippers along the river, this bird was frequently singing under a major road bridge. This shot really was taken at dawn, the trick being it was dawn the following (supposedly rainy) morning. 

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Rotten weather at Biwako

I had a good day out in Mie last Friday and had planned on staying the night to get a bit more gulling in the following day, however that evening the forecast promised an unremitting 80% - 90% chance of rain throughout Saturday so I decided to give up and head home. In the event there wasn't a drop of rain all day in Kyoto which had been due exactly the same weather as Mie according to my 'friends' at the Met Office. Thanks guys. So Saturday night I went up to the northern end of Lake Biwa, after all with only a 10% chance of rain limited to late afternoon the weather would be fine to check out the wildfowl situation. A ten percent chance; maybe the their forecasting ability is fine, it's just their math that's off.


I began the day in the mountains north of the lake and at 6:30 the clouds overhead weren't yet heavy but with fog lower down and ominous clouds approaching from the north things didn't look too good for the rest of the day. The mountains were fairly quite, reasonable numbers of the commoner finches and buntings, a good few Red-flanked Bluetails but surprisingly little evidence of woodpeckers, only the odd Jay, and definitely no Copper Pheasants. A stiff-winged Peregrine soaring high above was the only unexpected sighting. By 7:30 the opening spots of rain were signaling what was to come and I made my way down into the deepening fog below, and then on to the lake.

"And here's one I made earlier", which ought to strike a chord with Brits, I took this shot of Bluetail a week earlier on Mt Ibuki.

 It proved difficult to check the more distant ducks through the grey filter draining the lowlands of colour so I spent most of my time driving slowly round the fields and managed to track down two flocks of Tundra Swans (bewickii) by following birds flying 'inland' away from the lake.

A flock of Tundra Swans feeding on the fields.

Those Swans were close to the lake but another flock was two or three kilometres away and included a presumed columbianus. Going for the second flock really paid dividends as I came across two Common Starlings for the second time this weekend. I think I'd only previously seen one Common Starling in Kansai, so four in three days is good going.

A presumed Whistling Swan with the Bewick's.

Bewick's Swans.

Common Starlings with White-cheeked.

Another bird that caught my eye while slowly checking the fields was a strikingly large heron that flew up from a ditch and settled in a field. It 'felt' too large for the local modesta Great Egret the moment I saw it and sure enough, when I caught up with it, it had telltale yellow on the tibiae. There was a second modesta on the lake in front of the wild bird center at Kohoku, this seems a favourite spot for them, but the views are never great even when the weather is.

'Western' Great Egret on the fields.

Another with more obviously yellow legs.

Surprises through the murk weren't quite over; two Whiskered Terns hawking over a roadside pond stopped me in my tracks. I seem to be seeing more of this species nowadays, that's at least 10 this autumn, I don't know if that's down to luck or whether more are turning up here. Unsurprisingly however, it wasn't possible to get an even half decent shot of them.

Grey on grey: Whiskered Terns.

Now you'd be forgiven for thinking images of birds can't get much worse than those... but they can. As proof I'd offer the following image of four Eastern Marsh Harriers coming in to roost.

Four a group of five Eastern Marsh Harriers high over their roost site as the last of the poor light was giving up.

swans and geese

Following up on the "spiders" post last week these shots taken the same day focus on Greater White-fronted Geese and Tundra Swans.


I'd really been hoping to find the local wintering Taiga Bean Geese near Izumo which, though apparently within middendorffii, have slightly different mtDNA and hale from outside the recognised middendorffii breeding range and I gather are morphologically slightly different to the Lake Biwa population.


I find the Lake Biwa birds extremely variable which may simply be down to the inherent individual variation that can be expected within any goose gathering. Not only might I be barking up the wrong tree but there may not even be a tree to bark up. However I'm curious whether Shimane-type Beans also occur at Lake Biwa as it could account for differences I see at Biwako where even setting aside the small number of serrirostris that occur there often seem to be two groups; the obvious swan-like middendorffii and deeper-, shorter-billed birds.


Below is an old digiscoped image which gives an idea of what I mean. I was looking at this flock of middendorffii when the three birds in the foreground dropped in nearby and swam past the flock without joining it. The middendorffii have long bills with a slightly concave culmen and a pronounced bulbous tip. The three geese in the foreground have deeper-based bills with a deeper grin patch and a straight culmen from forehead to tip which almost creates a droop-tipped appearance, quite different to the stand-out middendorffii behind them. As I say there may be nothing more than individual variation in this but it's interesting how often these two types seem to form discrete groups within the flock.  

Three geese which seem to have deeper-based triangular bills (and consequently more prominent grin patches) lacking the bulbous tip extension shown by all the geese in the background.

Getting a good look at the Shimane birds would at least give an idea whether or not the idea might be worth looking into but unfortunately I wasn't able to locate any on the ground and only saw a very distant flock of about 70-80 in flight, identifiable by call. Greater White-fronted Goose was an altogether easier proposition. I saw the first ones roosting on a river at daybreak and small parties were frequent overhead as the sun came up. After locating a few on the ground more began to arrive.

Heads in the grass...


Most of the immatures have a dark nail and some other dark markings along the cutting edge to go with the limited white blaze, others have lost all trace of dark on the nail.

From another angle they weren't quite as in-the-grass as they'd seemed at first.

There were plenty of Tundra Swans around too, this stretch of coast can host large numbers on any suitable fields close to water.