BirdForum

It's been nearly a year since I posted anything here, in fact my last postings were just before the earthquake that devastated northern Japan. I had been along the coastline of Ibaraki Prefecture watching sea birds just a few weeks prior to the quake-tsunami. I have yet to return to see the damage.

Aside from the earthquake, 2011 was a good year for me. I was able to visit Thailand twice (once to the southern isthmus and once up north) and added over 100 new birds to my life list....

DaninJapan

I haven't even logged in my Korea trip report I took from 3-10 April but wanted to post my findings from my Amami trip (22-25 April).
First off, many thanks to my birding partner here on Okinawa Tom, and our visitor from Ireland, Dermot . We had a great time on Amami and I'm sure the trip exceeded all of our expectations.

Not many people get to Amami, it isn't the tourist magnet that Okinawa is for mainland Japanese on holiday. It is about 70% the size of Okinawa but with...

DaninJapan

Hello friends,

I've just returned from a 4 day trip to Kyushu Japan. Kyushu is the southern most of the four main islands of Japan. My birding partner Tom Marko and I visited Miyazaki, Kagoshima and Kumamoto Prefectures and tallied some 85+ species on the trip. The jury is still out on a Pipit species I photographed, it might be 86 species. Of those, I had about 10 lifers (need to check notes from some earlier trips to confirm the total) and Tom had about 20 lifers, so all told it...

DaninJapan

My little neck of the woods here is a place called Kin-Cho (Cho means town). Kin is even mentioned in several English language birding books, it's just that good of a place! I even have American and European birders asking me about visiting Kin. I guess being I live here, I take it for granted a bit, But the past two days have been quite thrilling, I picked up Water Rail on the 16th, and yesterday (17th) A lifer, Baillon's Crake, not just a glimpse, long views, I watched him for an hour getting...

DaninJapan

I had an odd birding experience tonight, around 8:00 as I was driving home from work, just as I went through the tunnel on 88 from Kin to Onna, a bird flew right in front of me and hit my car with a thud.
"Oh crap, I've killed a pigeon" was the first thing that went through my head, quickly followed by, "wait dummy, it's 8:00 PM, no pigeons out at this hour, you've killed an owl". I drove about 50 yards and then decided to make a "U-turn" and looked for a sprawled...

DaninJapan