With the weather so temperate and still, I decided to go in a new direction for birdwatching today, into the hills close to home. I simply hadn’t thought of it before. It netted me some very nice photos.

The first was one I’ve been trying to get on film since I started; a bird I had in my sights months ago, but my autofocus failed me. The Long-tailed Tit (Enaga • エナガ). The thing is so flighty, hopping from branch to branch so quickly, in trees with enough branches to cause focusing problems, that I had never been able to get it before–but this time I got lucky.

I then followed a trail about half a kilometer into a small farming valley (lots of those in Japan), and heard a high-pitched chirping song. After waiting five minutes for something to show, something did: a Meadow Bunting (Hoojiro • ホオジロ). But this time the conditions were right and I got a few very nice shots.

After that, I wandered around quite a bit, and was almost ready to call it a day, when I realized that the lens cap for my zoom lens was gone. Missing. I’d dropped it somewhere and hadn’t realized it. And I had been going for quite some distance, walking on a road along the hills, going in and out of side roads and dirt lanes. I figured my chances for finding it were not all that good, considering the road conditions, traffic and all that–I figured that by the time I found it, it’d be squashed by a car or something, if I found it at all.

But along the way, something surprising happened. As I stopped to rest on one of those beat-up old side roads, I saw a bird in the distance. It moved in a motion that was somewhat familiar, a kind of smooth start-glide-stop-start motion, almost leisurely, something I’d associated with Wagtails. The bird started out quite some distance away, but it kept getting closer, and closer, and finally, it just came up and sat on a power line right smack where I was. I got my camera out of my backpack, convinced that the bird would fly away before I could snap a photo, but it stayed there, almost as if it were giving me something to cheer up about after having been frustrated with the lost lens cap. The bird, with a bright yellow breast, had just caught a grub of some sort, and was resting before gulping it down, I can only imagine. It turns out that the bird is a female Grey Wagtail (Kisekirei • キセキレイ–named so despite the yellow), notable as a female because the males have a black chin.

It flew away when a train came along the nearby tracks, but it stayed long enough. And to make a good situation better, I found the lens cap laying on the side of the road, undamaged, just a few minutes later.