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

A Crested Serpent Eagle caught a huge toad in a rice field. As usual it flipped the toad onto its back and began eating from around the lower jaw. After a few minutes, a certain bird guide arrived in a wagon and ended up sandwiching the eagle between his vehicle and mine, and the wary eagle flew off.

Not just with Crested Serpent Eagles, but please, everyone, don't do things like sandwiching wild birds between vehicles. ^^;

Flushing it that fast, wouldn't his clients be unable to watch or photograph it? He must have felt quite awkward, because the guide, with clients on board, left without even looking our way...

Fortunately the eagle landed on a ridge between the fields two plots away, so I carefully moved my car closer and resumed observing. After the lower jaw it ate around the belly. Then, with the toad reduced to almost only its lower half, it peeled off the skin as if turning a glove inside out and swallowed it whole.

I had thought it might leave the skin because of the poison glands, but it swallowed the skin whole too. I kept watching for a while after the meal, and it went about its day with no apparent ill effects.

Crested Serpent Eagles eat toads fairly often, but I have never seen one get poisoned. Does toad poison not work on them?

The video also shows how neatly it peels the skin off.

The first Black-tailed Godwit of the season has arrived. It was feeding busily in a rice field.

I finally saw an Oriental Pratincole again. It was a juvenile born this year. I searched for others but this was the only one. Did it get separated from its flock by the typhoon?

About 20 Red-necked Stints were feeding together in a rice field. The snipe are as usual almost all Swinhoe's Snipe, with one Pin-tailed Snipe. The Common Snipe has not shown up yet.

Eastern Yellow Wagtails are numerous in every rice field, farm field and pasture.

The autumn migration is reaching its midpoint, and the rice fields are full of shorebirds and wagtails.

Among them, perhaps because of Typhoon No. 13, a Red-necked Phalarope dropped into a rice field.

Nearby, the Ruff from the other day is still staying. About eight Whiskered Terns, adults and juveniles together, were flying around.

Before the typhoon I looked over the beach in front of my house, and Common Sandpiper, Siberian Sand Plover, Kentish Plover, Ruddy Turnstone, Grey-tailed Tattler, Pacific Golden Plover and others were resting as if sheltering from the strong wind.

I thought the Common Sandpiper was partially albino, but it seems that some of its flight feathers had fallen out in some kind of accident, leaving S8 or S9 visible.

Two juvenile Ruffs were in today. I've been running into more Ruffs over the last few days, and every one has been a juvenile female.

Juvenile Long-toed Stints keep increasing too. In one paddy, most of the flock was juveniles.

Swinhoe's Snipe seem to be turning over, but there are plenty in every paddy. Common Snipe still haven't arrived.

Sharp-tailed Sandpipers are also arriving in greater numbers, though no juveniles yet. My mentor told me where a Pectoral Sandpiper was, but sadly I couldn't find it. A typhoon is approaching, so maybe it has already moved on...