A daily record.
Featuring photos of wild birds and nature, mainly from Okinawa Main Island and Ishigaki Island

The first Grey-streaked Flycatcher of the season. A juvenile.

Juvenile Pin-tailed Snipe.

Same individual as above.

Close to 20 Swinhoe's Snipe are staying in a single paddy field where numbers are highest.

Red-necked Stint, juvenile plumage.

Long-toed Stint, adult winter plumage.

Yellow Wagtail (leucocephala) juvenile. Arrivals of (Yellow) Wagtails are still very few.

Crimson Sunbird — no wait. Red Turtle-Dove, adult male.

Red Turtle-Dove, adult female.

Red Turtle-Dove, juvenile male. Mid-moult from juvenile to first-winter plumage.

Red Turtle-Doves perched in a leucaena tree. The second bird from the bottom is also a juvenile male Red Turtle-Dove in moult to first-winter plumage — noticeably further along in the moult than the individual in the photo above.

My wife was buying a drink from a vending machine when five small doves landed on the power line right in front of us. I raised my binoculars and found all five were Red Turtle-Doves.

Javan Pond Heron, first-winter plumage.

This individual showed little wariness.

After a while it flew off somewhere.

A juvenile Crested Serpent Eagle — the fourth individual confirmed on the island this season. It showed little wariness.

A Black-winged Kite perched on a power line. Juvenile feathers remain in the primaries and primary coverts, and the iris shows little red — a young bird.

A juvenile Curlew Sandpiper — first confirmed of the season.

White-winged Tern, juvenile (left) and adult.

White-winged Tern, juvenile.

Black Tern (centre) and White-winged Tern. Even mixed into a flock of Black Terns, the White-winged is easy to pick out by its flight style. Side by side, the body shape is different too.

This bird seems too large for a Little Stint compared to the Dunlin in the foreground… For a time, a Baird's Sandpiper — a species with only a handful of Japanese records — seemed like a real possibility, but it came to nothing.

Red-necked Stint, juvenile.

A juvenile Eurasian Tree Sparrow with strongly reddish-brown coloration. The strikingly reddish-brown sparrow from three months ago was in the same flock, so this could be its offspring. It would be fascinating if some form of natural selection were to produce a reddish-brown population, as has happened with the Ryukyu Stock Dove. If that day comes, I would like to propose the name Ishigaki Sparrow, following the precedent of Ishigaki Tit. ^^

A buff-morph juvenile Eurasian Tree Sparrow.

A juvenile Brown Shrike.