Little Heron (Butorides striatus) is a common summer visitor to Kyushu. It is called ササゴイ(笹五位/sasa-goi) in Japanese, which means 'bamboo bittern'. I started seeing them quite often recently around the harbour. Yesterday I went out and caught one juvenile bird feeding on a fish. However, the bird was quite shy and I wasn't so satisfied with the shots, so it's gonna be 'day 1' for this Little Heron project. Next time I'll try sneaking and get some better shots!
It's been raining all day for several weeks now. Okinawa people might already get bored with the typhoons. Few weeks back there were several massive landslides and water floods occurred in many prefectures, mainly in Kyushu and lower Honshu, like Yamaguchi, Fukuoka and Nagasaki. So birding was a bit out of my head, since it rains so bad that I don't even want to get out of my room. Until yesterday, I decided to go survey around the harbour just behind my dorm. Actually, I just wanted to get some photos of the Black-crowned Night-Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax), which last time I saw them perching around in quite a number, but when I got there I just didn't find any. Anyway, I still got few photos before the rain came and poured down again.
This time I decided not to use the teleconverter because I was inspired by some very Japanese bird photos, some very artistic ones, that usually focus on the bird's habitat rather than having huge birds that completely fitted to the frame. So I tried doing that kind of 'birdscape', not sure it worked well or not, though.
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