I got two new birds today: a Common Snipe and a Striated Heron. That along with some other nice photos, but the two new ones first. I should note that this brings my Japan life list to 76–I mistakenly thought I’d had 75, but I had 74. These two then bring me to seventy-six.

You may have heard of a “Snipe Hunt” before, a practical joke where a hapless mark is taken out into the forest late at night with a gunny sack and told to find and capture a “snipe” using the bag. As it turns out, the Snipe is a shorebird, and is not nocturnal, as the joke would have it. And I just caught my first one today, actually one of a group of four Common Snipes (Tashigi • タシギ) at the Tokyo Port Wild Bird Park.

The second new bird, the Striated Heron (Sasa-goi • ササゴイ) was hard to see–I only was able to find it because someone from the Wild Bird Society (they had a group tour there today) had spotted it and pointed it out to me. It’s kind of like a Black-crowned Night Heron, but its colors are not quite so contrasted and it has yellow and not red eyes. I wasn’t able to get too good an image because of how far it stayed from the viewing points in the park.

It became much more visible when contrasted against a darker background:

Like I said, the quality of these images are lacking. I really like the camera I have now; however, this guy had the kind of equipment that I really want:

His camera was a very simple, plain digital job just costing a few hundred bucks, but he had hooked it up with a mini-video screen, a shutter cable, and a monoscope on a tripod. He had to carry with him a boxed set of maybe a dozen double-A batteries to run the monitor, but the setup worked, an beautifully–he could aim using the viewscreen and take great long-distance shots. Not so good, he admitted, for moving birds, but for stationary ones, it was very impressive. Though I have to temper that desire with the knowledge that it would take a car to conveniently carry all that gear around…

Here’s a close-up of the setup, with an enlarged image (you can see he’s shot the heron) available if you click it.