Wildbirds gallery - Hakuba accommodation Pension Hayaokidori Nagano Japan

Wild birds gallery

Birds visit our garden.

We had been wondering how wild birds caught their foods especially in winter when it was difficult for them to do so. Some kinds of birds leave here during winter and the others stay here even in midwinter. Small birds for example titmice move quickly to get foods. We began to give them foods as peanuts, walnuts and seeds of sunflower not to die of hunger after December 1996.

But it was a problem how we gave them foods. In case of putting foods on a flat board, it will be difficult for small birds to find them when snow falls. So we bound foods with a piece of string and bound them to the branchs of the trees in the garden.
The upper left photograph is what we Japanese call "yamagara", about 14 cm in length. They say that yamagara lives only in the Far East.

Titmouse(we call "shijuukara"), yamagara, kogara, higara, enaga gather round peanuts, walnuts and some kind of woodpeckers gather round butter. Though it is not easy for us to bind foods to the branchs when we have much snow, we can't let small birds alone. For us,they may be companies who must tide winter together. The more weather condition gets to be worse for them, the more they gather round foods. We can watch the scene through the windows in the dining room, so we can see which race of bird is stronger than the others.

At the season of fresh green, they get to be busy to breed because a lot of insects that are their foods breed. At the time, only a few birds visit our garden. We hope that a lot of birds will visit our garden again whenever they'll suffer from lack of foods. The photo above shows a kogara comes to pick peanuts in the food box.