At 11:04 AM 7/30/97 -0700, Burton Guttman wrote:
> Also, it turns out that spring and summer are not the
>great times for birding in Japan anyway.

I was there in August 1994 and had the same experience.

>is not easy in Japan unless you can read the signs, written mostly in
>Kanji (adopted Chinese characters), and speak enough of the language to
>ask questions about where to go and understand the answers.

Yep. Wasted a lot of time just looking for places.

>My birding experiences were very frustrating at times because I was able
>to hear so much and see so little. I don't understand why there should
>be such a difference, but I don't think this is just my imagination.

This was my experience as well.

>One of the most common birds there is the Bush
>Warbler, Cettia diphone, which you can hear singing from many patches of
>woods; Even though
>you hear this bird just about everywhere you go, it is almost impossible
>to see;

I wonder if this is the bird I kept hearing, but only caught glimpses of on
the slopes of Chokai-san, a volcano south of Akita. I remember a great deal
of frustration.


>have European Tree Sparrows (Passer montanus) and Gray Starlings (Sturnus
>cineraceus) in the same places, and both are native.

I felt like I was in some parallel universe.


>our Common Crow, they have Carrion Crows and Jungle Crows.

I love the Jungle Crows. Neat birds.

>Oriental Greenfinch seems to be the ecological equivalent of our
>Goldfinch.

I was thinking Pine Siskin when looking at them. But I wasn't so well
acquainted with the Siskin at the time.

>Brown-eared Bulbuls are everywhere; what first seemed exotic soon became
>tiresome.

I saw moderate amounts of the Bulbuls.

> I wasted a lot of time trying
>to get a good look at birds sitting high in trees that always turned out
>to be Siberian Meadow Buntings,

It's weird how our experiences were so similar. I spent a great deal of time
one day staring at one of those high in a tree. Finally settling on the same ID.

> The one raptor you see everywhere is the Black Kite, which
>seems to always be sailing overhead even in the most built-up areas.

I have a picture of one sitting on a sign post at the university where I
stayed.

Sounds like you saw a number of very interesting species I missed out on. I
think I had a list of 26 species plus 11 more maybes.



Michael B. Brown
Puyallup, Washington
H-206-841-4281
W-206-841-8733
C-206-208-9588
borealis at borealis.seanet.com

"...I am glad I shall never be young without
wild country to be young in." -Aldo Leopold

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