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

Red-throated Pipit numbers are steadily increasing.

(Yellow-browed) Eastern Yellow Wagtail, winter plumage. Large flocks move around in units of 100 birds.

(Yellow-browed) Eastern Yellow Wagtail, first-winter plumage.

(Yellow-browed) Eastern Yellow Wagtail, first-winter plumage.

A female Siberian Stonechat. Two were in the same paddy field and occasionally squabbled.

I went to check the paddy field where a dark-morph Grey-faced Buzzard that has been wintering on Ishigaki-jima for five consecutive years as of last year comes to, but it hadn't arrived yet. There was a juvenile in its place.

A Crested Serpent Eagle eating a turtle.

A Western Swamphen photographed at about 30 metres. It has an air of quiet intensity about it.

A Western Swamphen that moved into the paddy field. It was pulling up rice plants and eating the roots.

A Western Swamphen taking flight from the grass.

In an abandoned, unharvested paddy field, it was feeding on the remaining rice.

At a glance the head alone might be mistaken for a Common Moorhen, but the size is completely different. The Western Swamphen is larger than you might expect.

Whenever seeds of grass-family weeds were available, it preferred those.