Since I was unable to blog from my laptop while on vacation, and I couldn’t get photos from my birding camera to the iPhone blog, I’ll have to catch up after the fact.

One of the biggest disappointments of our trip to Kawaguchi-ko was the weather–we just happened to pick a weeklong stretch of constant drizzle and rain, and so we were very limited in terms of what we could do. Fortunately, the view out our hotel room was the best I’ve seen for hotel-based birding. There was a nice little grove with some visible branches, and there was a good bit of activity there at times. I’d love it if I lived in a place like that, especially if I could set up a few nice bird feeders.

One of the biggest shows was an Enaga, or Long-tailed Tit. I was happy at this catch because I had never caught this bird with its brown coloring before.

All of Sunday and Monday were wet, but we lucked out a bit as Tuesday–the day we had to head back by noon–cleared up and even had some sunshine. So we ate breakfast and went to the local wild bird forest. Among other birds, we got a ton of Yamagara (Varied Tit) and Kawarahira (Eurasian Goldfinch).

There’s more, but I’ll get to that later–too much to do tonight to fit it all in.

One last note: the lake where we stayed was not really Lake Kawaguchi, but Lake Sai (“Lake West,” translated). Since the Japanese form is to use the name followed by -ko (“lake”), we stayed at “Saiko,” pronounced the same as “Psycho” in English.

I should have gotten a better look at that innkeeper….