ホオアカなど / Chestnut-eared Bunting etc.

The morning glow was getting better during the pre-dawn move.

Taken with the AF-P 70-300mm, which is attached to the D500 like a lens cap.
It’s almost never used for bird photography, but sometimes it does the job for landscape photography. It’s also good enough for sports events.
However, since it is a DX camera, it is exclusive to the D500 among the cameras I own. This makes it even more compact and lightweight, and the image quality is surprisingly good enough for my needs. The image stabilization works well, and the fact that it can capture 300mm images properly is a breakthrough considering the image quality of zooms in the same class in the past.

There were many chestnut-eared buntings flying around in the meadow.

I set my sights on what I thought was a song post, hid in the blind, and waited for more than 30 minutes.
The birds seemed to be wary of me because I was too close, and they seemed to avoid this spot, but finally one came.
Unfortunately, the light was not so good…

A bird suddenly appeared in the bushes. It flew away before I had time to observe it.
It looked like a warbler, but I couldn’t identify it in my picture book. It looked like a juvenile bird.

I found a Japanese striped snake in the same bushes.
I wondered if it was climbing a tree to get at a bird. It didn’t look like it was going to move much, so I approached it with my macro lens.

I thought there was something there, but then I saw ants walking around the body of the snake.

The Japanese striped snake is a common snake in Japan and is not poisonous.
The red eyes are quite striking.
According to wikipedia, they rarely climb trees, but this one was in a tree, so it might have seen something unusual.