MKinHK
Mike Kilburn
A long weekend getaway for my 50th birthday combined the acquisition of my first new scope for 15 years with a few days in Karuizawa, the beautiful mountain resort an hour northwest of Tokyo.
Nowadays I hardly use a scope as I do the vast majority of my birding on foot and by public transport, covering large areas of sometimes difficult terrain, and frequently in unpleasantly hot and humid conditions. But I do have a view over the water towards Hong Kong Island, and could in theory pick up more here with a scope that was not as elderly, dented and misted as my current second-hand Zeiss. It may have had one previous careful owner, but the current one most certainly is not cut from the same cloth!
Anyway, some desultory browsing and a HK-based birder offering an as-new Swarovski ATS 85 (plus digiscoping kit) eventually led me to the Kowa TSN-883 and WZ-11 zoom offered for a combined price of £1,600 on the BIC Camera website. BIC is one of two gigantic Japanese camera chains and, since Kowa is a Japanese brand, it seemed feasible that this “too good to be true” price would be kosher. The downside was that the scope and lens were in stores in different parts of Tokyo, and the online ordering function was not up to sending the bits to a single location (ideally I would have liked to pick it up at Haneda airport on arrival) so a mini tour of Tokyo (with three suitcases between two of us) eventually enabled the purchase of the body, lens, scope cover and a Manfrotto 700RS2 tripod head, before boarding the bullet train to Karuizawa.
Our hotel, the very beautiful Hoshinoya (which we got for an amazing 80% discount by booking early), was right in the heart of the key birding area and early this morning I headed up into the forest in pursuit of a cast headed by the beautiful endemic Copper Pheasant. Significantly more optimistically I was also hoping to connect with Solitary Snipe here – it is found along the river nearby, albeit generally deeper into winter. I had dipped on both species in January, so this was a reasonable excuse for a second attempt.
As I left the room a movement in the trees above my head turned out to be a dozen Japanese Grosbeaks eating sycamore seeds. Lovely as they are I’ve seen them a few times, and as dawn is always the prime time for pheasants I headed up into the forest. The path follows a stream along the floor of the valley that is fed by small rivulets along its slopes. More movement here between the leafless trees revealed six or eight more Japanese Grosbeaks, two Hawfinches and a couple of Dusky Thrushes coming down to drink and wash at one of these rivulets – lovely!
Arriving at the pool I followed the path on the left up some broad shallow steps and cast a casual look back along a path that also climbed, but doubled back towards the entrance. I was utterly blown away to discover that a dark brown blob sitting the middle of the path some 50 metres away was a male Copper Pheasant! And there, against all expectation, he continued to sit for a good ten to fifteen minutes! It was here my new scope absolutely came into its own allowing me to zoom all the way in and capture the beautiful intricacies of its plumage, down to the red upper eyering and the pale lower eyering, and the broad yellow fringes to the breast feathers that created a wonderful scalloping. I fired off a few shots and greatly lamented the fact that there is no phonescoping attachment for my iPhoneX as I could have had frame-fillers on full zoom! Eventually it started foraging along the left side of the path and showed a somewhat shortened but nonetheless handsomely-banded tail, which had mostly been hidden until then. It eventually returned to the path, where it turned, raised its head and flapped it wings a few times, showing me its rich red rump and the full extent of its tail. A couple of minutes thereafter it returned to types – apparently being flustered into running away by a noisy Willow Tit!
The forest here was full of birds – the most visible amongst them a loose foraging flock of 12 or 15 Eurasian Jays of the distinctive local race brandtii, half a dozen three or four each of Great Spotted and Japanese Green Woodpeckers plus five or six Japanese Pygmy Woodpeckers, most of which were amongst flocks of Japanese, Willow, Varied, Coal and Long-tailed Tits. A cleared area near the viewpoint for the snow-dusted Mount Asama held a Meadow Bunting and a female Red-flanked Bluetail that was re-growing its tail and a Wren was rooting on the edges of a stream as I headed back down the hill.
More to follow . . .
Cheers
Mike
Nowadays I hardly use a scope as I do the vast majority of my birding on foot and by public transport, covering large areas of sometimes difficult terrain, and frequently in unpleasantly hot and humid conditions. But I do have a view over the water towards Hong Kong Island, and could in theory pick up more here with a scope that was not as elderly, dented and misted as my current second-hand Zeiss. It may have had one previous careful owner, but the current one most certainly is not cut from the same cloth!
Anyway, some desultory browsing and a HK-based birder offering an as-new Swarovski ATS 85 (plus digiscoping kit) eventually led me to the Kowa TSN-883 and WZ-11 zoom offered for a combined price of £1,600 on the BIC Camera website. BIC is one of two gigantic Japanese camera chains and, since Kowa is a Japanese brand, it seemed feasible that this “too good to be true” price would be kosher. The downside was that the scope and lens were in stores in different parts of Tokyo, and the online ordering function was not up to sending the bits to a single location (ideally I would have liked to pick it up at Haneda airport on arrival) so a mini tour of Tokyo (with three suitcases between two of us) eventually enabled the purchase of the body, lens, scope cover and a Manfrotto 700RS2 tripod head, before boarding the bullet train to Karuizawa.
Our hotel, the very beautiful Hoshinoya (which we got for an amazing 80% discount by booking early), was right in the heart of the key birding area and early this morning I headed up into the forest in pursuit of a cast headed by the beautiful endemic Copper Pheasant. Significantly more optimistically I was also hoping to connect with Solitary Snipe here – it is found along the river nearby, albeit generally deeper into winter. I had dipped on both species in January, so this was a reasonable excuse for a second attempt.
As I left the room a movement in the trees above my head turned out to be a dozen Japanese Grosbeaks eating sycamore seeds. Lovely as they are I’ve seen them a few times, and as dawn is always the prime time for pheasants I headed up into the forest. The path follows a stream along the floor of the valley that is fed by small rivulets along its slopes. More movement here between the leafless trees revealed six or eight more Japanese Grosbeaks, two Hawfinches and a couple of Dusky Thrushes coming down to drink and wash at one of these rivulets – lovely!
Arriving at the pool I followed the path on the left up some broad shallow steps and cast a casual look back along a path that also climbed, but doubled back towards the entrance. I was utterly blown away to discover that a dark brown blob sitting the middle of the path some 50 metres away was a male Copper Pheasant! And there, against all expectation, he continued to sit for a good ten to fifteen minutes! It was here my new scope absolutely came into its own allowing me to zoom all the way in and capture the beautiful intricacies of its plumage, down to the red upper eyering and the pale lower eyering, and the broad yellow fringes to the breast feathers that created a wonderful scalloping. I fired off a few shots and greatly lamented the fact that there is no phonescoping attachment for my iPhoneX as I could have had frame-fillers on full zoom! Eventually it started foraging along the left side of the path and showed a somewhat shortened but nonetheless handsomely-banded tail, which had mostly been hidden until then. It eventually returned to the path, where it turned, raised its head and flapped it wings a few times, showing me its rich red rump and the full extent of its tail. A couple of minutes thereafter it returned to types – apparently being flustered into running away by a noisy Willow Tit!
The forest here was full of birds – the most visible amongst them a loose foraging flock of 12 or 15 Eurasian Jays of the distinctive local race brandtii, half a dozen three or four each of Great Spotted and Japanese Green Woodpeckers plus five or six Japanese Pygmy Woodpeckers, most of which were amongst flocks of Japanese, Willow, Varied, Coal and Long-tailed Tits. A cleared area near the viewpoint for the snow-dusted Mount Asama held a Meadow Bunting and a female Red-flanked Bluetail that was re-growing its tail and a Wren was rooting on the edges of a stream as I headed back down the hill.
More to follow . . .
Cheers
Mike
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