Author: Sonia Stephens

Birding Fukushimagata Wetlands, Niigata, Japan

Post author By Sonia Stephens
Post date October 17, 2012
1 Comment on Birding Fukushimagata Wetlands, Niigata, Japan

One of my day trips out of Niigata was to the Fukushimagata wetlands for birding. Fukushimagata is a park a bit northeast of Niigata City that provides habitat for birds- large numbers of waterfowl visit on migration and in the winter, but I was there at an “off” season and only saw a few species.

I headed on a local train east to the town of Toyosaka, getting there mid-morning. Toyosaka has clearly seen somewhat better days, to judge from the state of the downtown shopping arcade area. At any rate, I walked to the Fukushimagata wetlands, which are surrounded by rice fields just southeast of town. Many of the paddies had clearly been planted recently, and some of them had people in them planting. There were not too many birds in and around the paddies- Japan is not really a “birdy” place. This is probably partly due to the seasons, though.

fuku1 — Farmers planting rice, along the road outside of Toyosaka.

I’d originally thought that the distance from the station to the wetlands was about 1 km, but it turned out to be more like 4. So the walk was a lot longer than expected. In retrospect, it would have been helpful to look into catching a bus. The walk turned out to be fine, through a suburban area that was in better repair than downtown Toyosaka- the houses were reminiscent of the newer developments on Central Oahu or the west side of Kauai – small houses with walls, and low flat fields right outside of the town. Though this was rice, not sugarcane.

As I was walking, I heard some really loud, croaking and buzzing birds in the reeds, but was not able to get a look at them. This was a bit frustrating. When I got to the wetland protected area, there was a river running alongside it, with a spiral-shaped observation tower/nature center, and across the street a wetland complex. I visited the river first, and heard more of the buzzy birds, but was not able to see them. The visitor center had an admission fee, so I weighed going in, before deciding against it and crossing the elevated bridge over to the wetland side.

I stopped at an open teahouse/shelter building to drink some tea and eat a snack- some banana chocolate covered cookies that I’d grabbed in Niigata Station. I’d assumed there would be more food along the way, but there wasn’t much apparent in Toyosaka. But it was only 11, and I was still doing okay. A Japanese man sat next to me and tried to chat- he offered some of his lunch and I think I politely declined- but then gave me some gum. I felt a bit awkward about the encounter.

I did notice one person who looked like a birder walking along the edge of the wetlands – most of the people I saw were just out for a stroll and lacked birding paraphernalia, i.e., binocs, a vest, and a furtive manner. I walked in the opposite direction, but he ended up coming the same way I did when I was trying to identify a duck.

fuku4 — The observation tower. It probably would have had a great view, but I was eager to get to the birds…

He tried to indicate something in Japanese, but I told him I didn’t speak the language. So he asked for my book and pointed to a great crested grebe (most bird books are organized according to taxonomy, so the order of species will generally be the same and it’s easy to jump to a specific group regardless of language). Apparently they’re rare at the wetland, so he was quite excited. Since that communication was more or less successful, I asked him which reed-warbler was all around (the buzzing bird), and he pointed to the right one (Great reed-warbler). Cross-cultural geeky communication FTW! Anyway, that interaction worked out better than the man trying to feed me.

fuku5 — View of the lagoon from the shelter. There was a nice view of the mountains.

So, I proceeded on at the wetlands, visiting a viewing tower on the shore of the lagoon, and then headed back. By this point I was both tired and hungry, and wanted to rest my feet and get lunch. I also felt I would have done an honorable amount of walking by the time I got back to the station. Along the way, I passed food guy going the other way on his bike. Again, a bit awkward. But I successfully made my way back to the train station, Niigata, and onigiri and melon pastries.

My bird list for the day:

Mallard, Eastern Spot-billed Duck, Green-winged Teal & Greater Scaup
Little Grebe & Great Crested Grebe
Great Cormorant
Gray Heron, Great Egret, Little Egret & Black-crowned Night-Heron
Black Kite
Eurasian Moorhen & Eurasian Coot
Oriental Turtle-Dove, Carrion Crow, Sky Lark, Barn Swallow, Great Reed-Warbler, Narcissus Flycatcher, White-cheeked Starling, White Wagtail, Oriental Greenfinch & Eurasian Tree Sparrow

gardening outdoors

Starting a garden

Gardening has always been important to both sides of my family, and it was a big part of summers when I was growing up. Dad’s family comes from rural West Virginia, and Mom’s comes from small-town Austria and Romania, so gardening was always an integral part of how they got their food. When we were growing up, Mom and Dad made a big garden with a raised bed that took up a big chunk of the back yard- but that was nothing compared to the entire half of the backyard that my grandparents’ garden extended. So gardens (or more realistically, the yummy fresh fruits and veggies) were a pretty big deal to us kids.

Since I live in an apartment today, I don’t have a backyard in which to garden- and it seems that the screen on out patio is coarse enough to let in pesty insects, but fine enough to keep out their predators. Onions grow pretty well, but that’s about it. We also have the issue of a ravenous herbivore who is excellent at finding and uprooting vegetation. So everything has to be kept at above bunny-level.

But last month, a new opportunity came up-and we now have a plot at the UCF Arboretum’s community garden. They have an “adopt-a-plot” program that lets community members use part of their garden, which has a deer fence and sprinkler system- both of which are really important, given its location. The arboretum provides tools, compost and mulch, and most importantly, advice from the staff members.

garden1 — Our plot is the central dirt strip, which widens toward the back. The grassy strip (which we still have to mulch over) is the left border/pathway. The cardboard “fence” divides our plot from the neighbors’. We’ll probably have to come up with something more aesthetically pleasing as a boundary. The plant in the front is lemon verbena; the dirt area was just planted with bok choy seeds.

The plot that Yan and I are responsible for was previously used by someone else, so it had quite a few things growing in it already- including a lot of weeds. A lot of the plants were in bad shape or weren’t things we were interested in (the eggplant was both). But we’re keeping a few things, to see how it goes.

The first thing we did was weed, and mulch an access path. Then we aerated the dirt, and added some new dirt to even out the beds. Finally, we added a layer of compost to the top.

garden4 — View from the back end of the plot. On the left is a mulberry tree, and on the right are some tarragon, a tomato, beans, and a flowering plant (I haven’t figured out what yet) that’s good for attracting pollinators. We’ve planted carrots & radishes in the left plot, and misome (a bok choy relative) between the tarragon and the beans. In the background, you can see the sprinkler system and rain catchment barrel.

I’m going to try to remember to take photos and post them, but I haven’t been good at it so far. These photos are from yesterday. I planted some seeds last Thursday, and some of them are already sprouting as of Sunday. That’s always fun to see.

So we’ll see how this goes. We picked fast-growing plants so that we can hopefully avoid complications from possible freezes and harvest something early. We’re both pretty excited about getting fresh veggies out of this, and it’ll be fun to see how things do.

garden3 — We’ve kept a few eggplants in the back end of the garden. There were some spare collard and kale seedlings from the arboretum staff, which we planted to the left. To the right will be a long row of carrots and radishes.

bunny

Friday bunnyblogging

On a slow day, we decided to get some more footage of Noe (really, Yan did). First, the all-important feeding of pellets. This happens three times a day, though Noe would undoubtedly say that this is far too infrequent.

The second video (with slightly less artistic camera work) shows her eating some cecal pellets a few minutes later. While this sounds like a rather disgusting process, I think she does a pretty good job of making it seem quite dignified.

So now you’ve shared two important events in Noe’s day. I guess at some point we’ll have to film the all-important drinking of the breakfast juice…

bunny

Friday bunyblogging

Since Noe’s been developing arthritis, her napping postures are sometimes a bit odd.

posture1 — Notice how far her feet are under her body.

But she still manages to disapprove of having her photo taken.

posture2 — She’s actually probably having a nice dream involving parsley or something…

information representation visuals

Infographic of election-related dates

Post author By Sonia Stephens
Post date September 28, 2012
No Comments on Infographic of election-related dates

It’s election season here in the U.S., and the rules for who can vote when and where can be pretty confusing. Here’s a set of infographics from NPR that show voting-related dates for each state.

For Florida, here’s the graphic:

So as of today, Floridians have 11 more days to register to vote. Those already registered can request an absentee ballot right away, or early vote in-person from Oct. 27 through Nov. 3. Florida ballots will be crazy long this year (as in 5-10 pages!), so Floridians should really consider exercising one of these options.

bunny

Friday bunnyblogging

Bun’s carrot, not yours.

Japan travel

Venturing to Niigata

Niigata City, capital of Niigata Prefecture, isn’t really a travel destination for foreign tourists at all, but we ended up staying there for five nights because of a conference Yan was attending. Unsurprisingly, there was a huge contrast with Kyoto in terms of Romanized signage, though there were two English-language maps at the tourist information center (one, of restaurants, was somewhat out of date).

Niigata is a port city on a plain, surrounded by rice paddies. This photo is of the countryside on the way back from Niigata to Tokyo; the mountains were barely visible from Niigata itself. (Photo: Y. Fernandez)

When researching this trip, it seemed that all the guidebooks basically assumed one would just use the city as a jumping-off point to ferries to Sado-ga-Shima, the island just off the coast. So I did a lot of scrounging online for information about things to do, some of which came in handy. I thought I’d put that info here for others to reference.

The bus system worked pretty similarly to the one in Kyoto (pay at front when exiting), so that made it a bit easier, but we ended up mostly walking (which was pretty doable). There were no paper maps of the bus system available at the tourist office, but the main terminal, on the north end of the train station, has a large mural that depicts the city but routes (unfortunately, we didn’t discover this until the day before we left).

niigata1 — View of Niigata north from the convention center, across the Shinano River to the Sea of Japan. (Photo: Y. Fernandez)

The place where our lack of ability to read Kanji was most of an issue was in restaurants. It’s much harder to be more adventurous about that sort of thing when one is a vegetarian. So we didn’t eat as well as we did in Kyoto. …I should probably rephrase that to say we did have some good food (some really excellent tofu one night, and some damn good sushi), but the language barrier created challenges.

The city is definitely grittier than Kyoto. It didn’t help that it rained off and on most of the time we were there- it sort of added to the industrial landscape. We stayed in an inexpensive business hotel, Dormy Inn, which was close to the train station and a bit over a kilometer from Yan’s meeting site. It was quite nice for the price- had an en-suite bathroom (it was also larger than the Kyoto hostel!) and two onsen on the premises (which we didn’t avail ourselves of).

niigata-view — View from our hotel to the convention center. The residential neighborhood was nice to walk through on the way to the meeting. (Photo: Y. Fernandez)

There are a few main areas of tourist interest in the city. Downtown/Bandai (between the train station and the Shinano River) contains a lot of restaurants, shopping, bars, and strip clubs. Across the Shinano River to the north is the more traditional nightlife district (possibly more upscale bars?) and what seemed to be a newer downtown area. This more northerly district historically had lots of canals; it was a port area as well as the red-light district. Today, the canals have been filled in and are now streets. It’s fairly easy to walk between and around these areas. South of the station (which we didn’t get to ) is the main pro soccer stadium and a large lagoon with parks and gardens. Much of the rest of the city is residential and industrial areas.

niigata2 — Bandai District from the convention center. Niigata Station is behind the taller buildings. You can sort of see the lagoon and stadium in the upper right. (Photo: Y. Fernandez)

I’ll post later about two areas in the city where I took walks: along the Shinano River to Hakusan Park, and to Nishikaigan Park along the coast.

I ended up doing three day trips out of the city using my rail pass (Tokyo’s Ueno Park, Echigo-Yuzawa, and Fukushimagata Wetlands); I could probably have spent another day just wandering the city instead, but these were things I was pretty excited about seeing (more in later posts).

Things I ended up not seeing that seemed like they might be neat:

Northern Culture Museum (via bus): an old family estate and teahouse in a rice-growing area.
Sakata & Murikami (via train): small towns with historic areas that were recommended to me as scenic.
Yahiko (via train): a forested mountain and shrine southwest of the city.
Toyanogata Lagoon (via bus): Big Swan Stadium is on this lagoon; there are also parks and apparently excellent birding in winter.
Sado Island, of course.
There’s also a tourist but that takes a route through scenic parts of the city, which would have been useful for orientation, but I didn’t take:

bunny

Friday bunnyblogging

Noe likes hanging out behind the bikes on the porch.

This means that stray rabbit fur floats around and gets embedded in the lube on the chains, so we (really, Yan) have to do a lot of cleaning.

Noe’s only contribution to that is trying to eat the grease-stained newspaper. Sometimes, she can be pretty dumb.

birds Japan outdoors travel

Urban animals of Japan

Because we were mainly in urban areas in Japan, we didn’t see much in the way of wildlife. Really, the deer in Nara were the only megafauna we saw; we were hiking in areas with wild monkeys a few times, but only saw signs warning of their apparent evil.

Seriously, do not mess with the monkeys! Sign from Fushimi Inari.

Of course, there were feral cats a few times, and the nutria in the Shimogamo River. But we didn’t see anything really cool like tanuki.

I did a fair amount of birding, though it was mostly opportunistic in the sense of carrying my binoculars around with me.

The season and areas we were in weren’t really conducive to seeing a wide variety of birds, but I did see 45 different species (25 lifers).

The only raptor we saw was the Black Kite; there were a lot of these in Kyoto. We’d occasionally hear them calling from our hotel room window, and look out to see them riding thermals over the city.

We ended up seeing some neat invertebrates too. A wet day in Kyoto showed us a land planarian that was several inches long.

worm — Pretty sure this is *Bipalium kewense.* (Photo: Y. Fernandez)

I’m not very good at ID’ing insects, but we saw a lot of flying critters in riparian areas (including the giant hornet!). I have no idea what this one is (thankfully, it was not flying):

bug — Seen near a stream in Higashiyama. (Photo: Y. Fernandez)

And there were some insects in scenic places, like this caterpillar found on a jacket in the forest at Fushimi Inari:

inchworm — Kind of a cute little guy. (Photo: Y. Fernandez)

If we visit again, it would be nice to get into some less urbanized areas to see more wildlife. Maybe a Hokkaido trip in the future…

bunny

Friday bunnyblogging

This is what a very relaxed bunny looks like: