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A board full of cancellations at Heathrow didn’t provide the most optimistic of starts, but we left on time and arrived in Tokyo early.  Unable to get into our room for 7 hours we took a train into Tokyo and went birding around the Imperial Palace gardens.  We had a glorious day with a couple of lifers for me, and a hatful for Karen.

We’re a tad weary now, though.  The tour starts early tomorrow morning.

Business class was a nice treat, but we’d better not get too used to it

The Imperial Palace Gardens

Displaying Falcated Duck

Daurian Redstart

Plum blossom

Japanese White-eye enjoying the blossom

Pale Thrush

Black-faced Bunting

Dusky Thrush

The view from our room leaves no doubt as to where we are

Storm Ciara arrived today, and as I had a bit of shopping to do in town, I walked down with a camera.  We haven’t had the rain that Yorkshire seems to have had, but it was very windy, although the only place that was genuinely hard to stay upright was just in from the coast, where the street layout formed a wind tunnel.  On the beach it was tough to hold a camera steady, but this isn’t the biggest sea I’ve seen in Worthing.

The pier was closed

Grounded

Damn, and I’d brought my trunks, too.

The blog’s been a bit quiet of late, as I’ve been walking too far to carry my SLR.  Today I tried out a new camera, which is small enough to carry the 28 miles I covered today, but has a long enough lens  to make a decent effort at birds.  The result was OK, if not dazzling.  The light for the Snipe (which never perform like that when I have an SLR with me) was pretty poor, so there’s a fair bit of noise, but the sun had come out for the, fairly distant, Nuthatch.  It will do for a record shot, should I ever find a rare bird.

Snipe

Nuthatch

A beautiful late afternoon, looking towards Worthing from the South Downs Way

It’s been a while since I actually connected my small camera to the PC.  It seems I’ve taken a few half-decent landscapes and sunsets.

The flooded Amberley Wild Brooks From Rackham

Arundel Castle from the Black Rabbit

Sunset from Steep Down

The same sunset a bit later, over Worthing

There haven’t been any posts this year, mainly because I haven’t been taking many pictures.  There have been a lot of long walks, without a camera, which limits things.  Today we had a moderately long walk to Shoreham with a camera, seeing Purple Sandpiper and Kingfisher at the fort, Greenshank in the harbour and a Rock Pipit on the river.  Here’s a few pictures, along with a few Kites from the end of last year.

Stonechat

Red-breasted Merganser

Teal

Greenshank

Red Kite

Red Kite

Merry Christmas to all of my readers (both of you).

Here’s another shot of the shrike from yesterday in slightly better light.

With the weather looking good, possibly for the last day before Christmas, I took one of my remaining days off with the intention of a 20+ mile walk around the Cissbury and Chanctonbury Rings. 

My only concession to birding at Cissbury Ring was to walk at high speed around the perimeter checking the bushes for a Great Grey Shrike (there was one for a day a couple of weeks ago – surely long gone – but I’ve always fancied that there should be one up there one winter).  My plans were thrown into disarray when I actually found one.  It played the usual Shrike game of hide and seek , but ended up showing beautifully: what a shame I only had my compact camera, but it was meant to be a long walk.

The hour spent there meant that plans had to be changed, and the day turned into a shorter walk, returning to Cissbury in the afternoon, to meet up with Karen and my SLR.  The light was now awful and the bird utterly uncooperative, but it finally deigned to sit around for a couple of pictures.

(It ended up at 16.5 miles)

Perfect light, perfect pose: wrong camera!

Right camera, terrible light

I wasn’t up to much today, having just got back from a week working in Japan.

A short walk over to the reedbed just east of us failed to produce the hoped-for Jack Snipe, but 6 Snipes and a Woodcock were good, and this Peregrine flew into a pylon above us.

Peregrine

The photos from my last few posts are now in one place in Madagascar 2019

There are more photos, and better quality and higher resolution copies of the ones posted here on my OneDrive.  It might be a bit slow: there’s a lot of big files there.

The last lot, this time from our trip up north to Ampijoroa.

A Coquerel’s Sifaka takes the low road.

The long journey was scenic

Madagascan Hoopoe

Coquerel’s Sifaka

Sickle-billed Vanga

The beach at Mahajunga

Bernier’s Teal

Malagasy Sacred Ibis

Dimorphic Egret

The other morph

Bernier’s Teal

Broad-billed Roller

Frances’s Sparrowhawk

Striated Heron

Madagascan Buzzard

Madagascan Fish Eagle

Malagasy Coucal

Purple Heron

Humblot’s Heron

Brown Lemur

This baby Sifaka just wanted to climb onto its mum, but was made to practice jumping from bough to bough.

Green Jerys at roost

Fat-tailed Dwarf Lemur

Golden-brown Mouse Lemur

Grey Mouse Lemur

Schlegel’s Asity

White-breasted Mesite

Red-capped Coua

Olive Bee-eater