Yasugawa (Yasu River) in Ritto City, Shiga Prefecture, Japan, is a short walk from my house. Since the beginning of winter I’ve been spending a lot of time along the river, trying to photograph wildlife, mostly birds.

I spent so much time taking photos and trying to learn the names of birds that I fell behind in file management and uploading. I’ve been sharing on Twitter as @glpjp, and finally I uploaded some of my photos to my Flikr photostream in a new album, Lower Yasugawa Birds.

Waiting quietly, watching carefully

I began on December 22, 2014, sitting quietly on the riverbank and waiting for a kingfisher that did not appear. Instead, a small flock of great egrets landed right in front of me.

I spent the following week trying to photograph a kingfisher (Japanese: カワセミ or 川蝉).

From shaky movie clips and bursts of stills I managed to make a short movie.

While I was sitting along the riverbank, I saw a few other birds, such as Eurasian wigeons (ヒドリガモ).

Japanese black kites often soared nearby, and one perched for while across the river from my location.

On January 1, 2015, I made a field recording, Wind in Young Bamboo.

Overnight the scene changed as we had more snow than we’d seen in several decades. I didn’t expect to see birds, but a little egret was in the canal where I’d been recording the previous afternoon.

As I walked around in the snow for several days, I enjoyed the quiet, saw some active birds, and made a short movie, New Year Snow 2015.

In January a few birds were active. A brown-eared bulbul (ヒヨドリ) often appeared in a large tree.

Dusky thrushes (ツグミ) could be seen in Yasugawa Sports Park, in bushes along the riverbank, and in nearby fields.

Diversity

As I noticed other birds that I did not recognize, I tried to take photos and then learn their names.

A lot of olive-backed pipits (ビンズイ) continue to feed under the pine trees in the small woods at Yasugawa Sports Park.

Several species of ducks have appeared. For example, some Eurasian teal (コガモ) have been here at the same place since early February.

A few common mergansers (カワアイサ) were here briefly in early March. They stayed upriver with some cormorants and a great egret near swift water. Twice I saw them hunting alongside a great egret.

Just as winter ended and spring began I saw a pair of spot-billed ducks swimming in a pond along the river.

Here and there individual small birds hid in bushes and came out now and then. For example, neighbors and I often saw a male Daurian redstart (ジョウビタキ) at the ground golf course near the river.

An elusive female hid in bushes at the riverbank. I spent hours trying to get a clear photo of her.

A bull-headed shrike (モズ) lives downriver near the track in Yasugawa Sports Park. I saw the bird often, but it rarely perched for longer than a few seconds.

Oriental greenfinches (カワラヒワ) came to the woods in March. I saw many of them in trees, but it took a while to get photographs.

Recently I saw a pygmy woodpecker and a willow tit near each other in the same tree. I hope to get photos, but so far I’ve seen them only one time.

Until I spent time outdoors with a camera this winter, I hadn’t known many species of birds. In fact, I hadn’t even known such a diverse winter bird population existed here so close to home. I mistook a few until I got clearer photos, read descriptions of them, and studied photos taken by birders. It took a while to learn their names. Now I really appreciate the knowledge that birders share after their years of close observation and careful study.

Now foliage is coming back, and soon leaves and flowers will make bird photography more difficult. I plan to spend more time doing other activities, but I’ll keep going to the river and watching these beautiful creatures.

Photo sharing

Until last week my winter bird photo sharing was limited to Twitter: Photos and videos by Greg Peterson (@glpjp)

Finally, after organizing older photos, I uploaded some of my photos to my Flikr photostream in a new album, Lower Yasugawa Birds.

In light my experiences this winter, I think my best sequence for sharing is to first upload to my Flikr photostream, then share on Twitter as @glpjp, and finally to post here on Shiga Rivers when I can offer something more substantial than a tweet.

Technical notes

For most bird photos I used my biggest lens, an old Olympus OM-System ZUIKO MC AUTO-T 300mm/f4.5 manual lens, with an Olympus OM-D E-M5 and then an E-M5 Mark II camera and an OM ADAPTER MF-2. For stability I tried a monopod, but soon switched to a lightweight tripod, a Velbon UT-43Q. This tripod is very easy to carry, but I found that the ball head did not work well when I was following birds. Finally I switched to my older Velbon Sherpa 545 II with a Velbon FHD-65D fluid head. This is a bit heavy, but I can use it as a monopod or fairly steady tripod. I seem to take my best photos with this tripod and head.

Photo management became an issue as I took 50-100 photos a day. After some culling in the camera, I uploaded my photos to Dropbox from an old MacBook. The Camera Uploads software changes file names to date/time, which is convenient; however, it puts a blank space between date and time. I dislike spaces in file names, so I wrote a little Bash Shell script to replace each space with ‘T’. Also, RAW and JPEG versions of some photos had different names, with the JEPG name one second after the RAW name. For example, a RAW image timestamp of 14:22:10 might have 14:22:11 for the JPEG timestamp. I those cases I manually renamed the JPEG filenames to match their RAW filenames.

I do all photo post-processing with
Digikam on a Lenovo ThinkStation S20 running Fedora Linux. Digikam works well for my purposes. It handles metadata well, and the editor, Showfoto, is powerful enough for my needs: cropping, resizing, sharpening, and adjusting brightness, contrast, and color saturation. Digikam often fails to start at first, but after restarting it works very well and satisfies my needs. Fedora Linux is proving to be an excellent operating system for multimedia production.