Quick New Forest trip

My housemates have been busy obsessing over Pokemon Go, but I've resisted the temptation to download it myself and instead decided to pop down to the New Forest on Monday morning to 'catch' a couple of real-life organisms instead: Bog Orchid and Silver-studded Blue. Having not tried for them before, the former was a new orchid for me and it was several years since I'd seen the latter.

First stop was a small, boggy slack not too far from the A31. Among the many sundews (Drosera rotundifolia?) and other interesting plants I eventually got my eye in and started to pick out my first Bog Orchids. I'd heard that these things are notoriously difficult to see as they tend to be absolutely tiny but there were several well-grown and robust specimens that positively towered at around 15cm! The closer I looked, the more these dainty orchids became apparent - I counted at least 30 without too much effort. Photographing such a tiny plant among dense, grassy vegetation wasn't such an easy matter, and you have to be extremely careful here to avoid trampling the orchids and other plants. Thanks, as ever, to Sean Cole for his handy gen.

Bog Orchids are tiny and can be extremely difficult to see among the vegetation

An impressively sized and photogenic specimen - just a shame it was a little over

Another sizeable specimen and in better condition

Close-up of the above individual

There were several robust specimens 'towering' at over 10cm tall, but this was a more typical spike (with 20 pence piece for size comparison)

I then headed over to Ocknell Plain and spent about half an hour chasing the hundreds of Silver-studded Blues around, trying for nice photos. A hard species to do justice to once they've warmed up!

The only individual I found with its wings still closed on what was a very warm morning 

 A delightfully fresh male sunning itself

On my way back to London I called in at Alice Holt Forest, near Farnham, and spent a little over an hour walking up and down the ride at Straits Inclosure. It was a gloriously hot and sunny morning and therefore flummoxing to learn from all the butterfly-ers returning along the track that no-one had seen any Purple Emperors! Plenty of butterflies were on the wing, though, including several Marbled Whites and some beautiful Silver-washed Fritillaries. I hung around at the second observation tower for a while and was rewarded with a flyover Purple Emperor at 11:18 - it did a couple of loops, attacked a Brown Hawker and then disappeared in to the treetops. Despite my best efforts to lure it down, I didn't see it again - or any others for that matter.

Japan 2015 day 13: Hokkaido - Tokyo - Karuizawa

31 December 2015

Looking north from Furen

Our final morning on Hokkaido was to be spent driving south to Kushiro from Furen, taking in a few sites en route. First port of call was a woodland track between Furen and Ochisii - Take had told us it was a decent place to look for the striking grisiventris subspecies of Bullfinch, which we had not yet seen. A slow drive through the forest with several tactical spots eventually produced a Bullfinch, but alas it was a female rather than the pink-cheeked, grey-bellied male we'd been after! The woods were otherwise pretty quiet, a typical range of common woodland species (including several Japanese Pygmy Woodpeckers) and a few Steller's Sea Eagles were as good as it got.

It was pretty clear that the holiday season was in full swing on arrival in Ochisii. The harbour was totally devoid of people, let alone fishing activity, and gulls were extremely thin on the ground. A group of nine Falcated Ducks was a pleasant surprise and there were also several Black Scoters and a Scaup. With time pressing we decided to head south to Kushiro to spend the final couple of hours photographing gulls at the harbour. A quick stop in Akkeshi produced a first-winter Vega and a couple of Kamchatka Gulls among the commoner Slaty-backed and Glaucous-winged Gulls.

Many second-winter Slaty-backed Gulls tend to look quite grotesque

Given that everywhere was shut down for New Year it was no great surprise to find far fewer gulls in an eerily quiet Kushiro harbour, but the Slaty-backs kept us entertained until we'd used up our final four loaves of bread (and two bags of popcorn). There was a little more ice around the harbour which had also concentrated groups of Scaup, Goldeneye, Harlequin and Red-breasted Merganser, and so we enjoyed our final looks at these species (and our last White-tailed Eagle) before the time came to head to the airport for our 13:40 flight.

Kushiro Harbour just a short while before leaving Hokkaido

The rest of the day was spent travelling. We arrived back in Tokyo mid-afternoon, enjoyed a typically efficient breeze through Haneda Airport and were soon at Tokyo station. Before boarding the Shinkansen up to Karuizawa we enjoyed a bit of train-spotting, which I'm not ashamed to admit to in Japan. It's hard not to stand and admire the artistic beauty of the bullet trains arriving and departing with enduring precision at Tokyo station - they are some of the most extraordinarily designed machines you will ever see and I'm certainly not embarrassed to have been the excitable tourist standing at the end of the Platform 23 that afternoon.

Shinkansen at Tokyo station

We were picked up at Karuizawa station by our hosts at Pension Edohara and were enjoying yet another delicious meal soon after. New Year's Eve actually turned out to be a bit of a tame affair, as it apparently is for most people in Japan, Traditionally families spend it together, eating a nice meal and watching their favourite TV programs. So that's what we did, and New Year was welcomed in with a cold Kirin watching some sort of hybrid sport that appeared a mix of sumo, cage fighting and boxing ...