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

With the year-end rush on, I have no time to go out birding!! I'm dashing around Ishigaki Island and Yonaguni Island, watching birds out of the corner of my eye.

Here are a few species I photographed on the move: two Citrine Wagtails, a flock of several dozen Little Buntings, Dusky Thrushes and Amur Stonechats.

Long-tailed Shrike and a juvenile Crested Serpent Eagle have also turned up, but I don't have time to go and see them... ^^;

Two Common Shelducks and several Black-headed Gulls are staying. Both are rare on tropical Ishigaki Island.

I keep running into Black-headed Buntings this season. This one, different from the bird I found in the same paddy field 3 days ago, was eating rice with Eurasian Tree Sparrows.

Both Pied Avocets are still here, and two Common Shelducks and four Northern Lapwings have also arrived, making the paddy fields of Ishigaki Island livelier than ever.

The Black-winged Kite appears every day at a set time. Today I was able to watch it catch a rat relatively close by. It hovered several dozen metres up, and when it spotted a black rat hiding in the sugarcane field it dropped in the Black-winged Kite's distinctive pose, as if throwing up its arms in a cheer and thrusting out its feet. It vanished into the sugarcane, and after a while flew out with the rat firmly in its grasp.

The rat was already dead. It seemed to have finished it off by biting the vital spot at the neck.

No luck with the Mugimaki Flycatcher again today, but a small flock of Brown-headed Thrushes had come in. I first confirmed them two weeks ago, and this is the first time I've photographed them this season.