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

The male keeping watch over the nest tree from the shade of a tree, sheltering from the hot sun.

A Brown Hawk-Owl staring intently at the nest entrance, listening to the sounds of chicks shuffling around inside and practising their wing-flapping. This individual always perches somewhere so close you feel you could almost reach out and touch it.

Japanese Sparrowhawks on combat alert. The lower bird is the male, the upper is the female.

A female Japanese Sparrowhawk in emergency-scramble posture.

The male Japanese Sparrowhawk mostly attacked from behind. This was in contrast to the female, who came at me head-on.

A female Japanese Sparrowhawk letting out a cry of rage.

The male won't attack when we're making eye contact, but when he comes from behind he cuts it far closer than the female does. When I spun around and found his sharp talons right in front of my face, my blood ran cold… ^^;

I only dared take a few shots of the nest — too nerve-racking. There appear to be well-grown chicks inside. One is visible in the centre.

The young couple who appeared to be breeding for the first time also had their chicks hatch safely. The chicks have grown quite large, yet for some reason the female is still brooding them. ^^: Overprotective because it's their first time raising young?

This is the pair whose nest-material carrying I confirmed the other day, and their chicks had already hatched.

A female Brown Hawk-Owl driven out of the nest hole now that the chicks have grown. You can see that the secondaries and coverts are worn ragged from incubating in a narrow tree cavity. The sex of individuals here can be told apart by the bill pattern.

Roseate Terns diving on a school of small fish. Two fish that appear to be trevally are visible in the water.

White-capped Noddy and Roseate Tern. Here you can see three fish in the water.

A flock of Roseate Terns flying over the blue sea.

A White-capped Noddy against the emerald-green sea in the summer sun.