Saturday, January 22, 2011

Kingfisher

Recently I spotted a kingfisher fishing in our local river, the Konogawa. It was the biggest kingfisher I've ever seen.



And as an added bonus, here's a regular visitor to the blueberries. I don't know what kind of bird he is, but he's very pretty and quite assiduous in fertilizing the ground under the blueberries.

Saturday, January 08, 2011

Various scenes

I got an iPhone a few months ago, and I'm quite impressed with the photos it takes. Here are a few recent ones.

From our balcony. There was some precipitation at sunset.

The temple thingie. November storms tore the doors off and broke the glass,
but the day after I reported the tragedy to the village headman, they were as new again.

Not a bad spot for a house.

The weather has been quite weird of late, with some spectacular skies.
This lopped-off double rainbow with triangular sunbeam was one of the
more spectacular phenomena. It lasted for about 5 minutes and was hard to ignore.

Mikan trees, lakes, sea, islands

What have we here? African dancing girls!
Christmas evening at the African night was a blast.

Crime scene

I went for a walk at lunchtime the other day up the valley where a French fellow and his wife are building a new house (very international we are here), when I came upon this grisly scene.

It's a tanuki with a smallish hole in its rump (it probably felt like a largish hole to the tanuki in question).


The question is, whodunnit? There are certainly hunters around here because I've seen them with their guns, but I don't think they'd shoot a tanuki, nor would they leave it lying dead on a pavement. Would a boar be able to gore a tanuki, and would it have reason to do that? The corpse was gone the following day.

Round pond resurgens

In April last year, I took out my round pond and replaced it with a bath. Having pondered (ha!) where to put it next, I decided that the very place where it has sat since April would be fairly ideal.

So I dug a hole with a remarkably perfect shape for the steel pot, and rolled it in.

A well-dug hole.
Note the long-handled, small-headed spade which I cobbled together myself.


Now I'll just have to avoid falling into it in the dark.


Two ponds now. Boy will the frogs be happy!