Mention Hokkaido to a naturalist and usually the first thing to come to mind are the red-crowned crane spectacle seen each winter on the lowland marshes and fields in the SE of the island. The second is usually the Stellar’s eagles that return each winter to feed from the vast ice shelves that form off…
Author: davidpallash
The Lynx of all Lynxes
In February of 2021, the family and I made our way to Spain on a short break, a pre-COVID booking that got pushed and pushed. I’m actually grateful the push forced us to rebook in February rather than the original August as temperatures in the Sevilla region have been skyrocketing recent years, earning the name…
7 Days in Provence
2020 certainly has shaped up as a year to remember for everyone, everywhere. And for mostly the wrong reasons, or perhaps “reason.” A two-week trip to Spain was cancelled earlier in the summer (first-world problem) with all the uncertainty of what was going on, but we were fortunate to be in a position in July…
Tokyo Winter 2018
I lived in Tokyo for nearly 12 years and during that time, really didn’t do much birding or wildlife watching. It was always there but I never actively pursued it, instead focussing all my time on my other passion, music. Towards the end of my time there, the last couple of years, my wife and…
Danish Finches & More
After years of working for a certain Danish toy company and travelling to Denmark very regularly, I finally managed to invite myself to a friend’s home to photograph their bird table. Not so much the table as what visits it every winter. Each year, as the temperature drops, the table sees incredible winter visitors arrive…
Tawny of Christchurch
I’d been reading about a tawny owl that roosts out in the open in the middle of an urban park for some time. Well, the story goes that an owl called Mabel took up roost in 2007 but was last seen in 2017. So… is this Mabel? Unlikely sadly given the life expectancy of wild…
A Thrush Visits from Asia
I’m not one really to “twitch”, but when a bird turns up from Asia or similarly far afield, and it’s not too far away, I’ll always pop along out of interest and maybe get some photos along the way. Most vagrants don’t show well enough to get decent photos, so when I heard a black…
The Owls of Serbia – December 2019
For a long time, I’ve really wanted to see the Long Eared Owl roosts of Serbia and finally my father and I made the pilgrimage. And we weren’t disappointed. We flew into Belgrade one late winter afternoon, picked up our hire car and started our hour long journey to the only hotel that ever seems…
Spoonbills at last
The last two weekends I have spent a bit of time at a nearby spot called Abberton Reservoir. The main reason being two spoonbills showed up and have been most accommodating with where they decided to hang out I.e. not miles away from a hide but right in front of a road going over a…
Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina – July 2019
A family holiday took us to Croatia this summer for an albeit short sprint of a break spent between Split and Dubrovnik, but mainly of the latter. As the title suggests, we also made it to Bosnia & Herzegovina for a couple day-trips, though any kind of wildlife watching was restricted to one site. In…
Wildlife Wander 