Finding sable on Hokkaido

March 23, 2024

I’m sitting at the New Chitose Airport waiting to leave the island of Hokkaido, Japan after a weeklong animal-finding trip. There is lots of information online about travelling around and finding animals on Hokkaido, which I used to great advantage before coming here. For the most part I don’t think I have anything useful to add to all the information out there. Jon Hall’s report from this past January was particularly useful to me but included the frustrating news that there was no longer a reliable site in Hokkaido (or anywhere) for sable (Martes zibellina).

A few days ago, to my surprise and by sheer luck, I was able to see two sable over the course of a single evening! The first was at a private residence, but the second was at a nearby guesthouse where I was staying, Papilio. In both cases the sables were attracted to bird feeders and seemed pretty habituated. The sable at Papilio seemed particularly fond of suet, because it was dangling from the suet feeder when I first went to look for animals just after dark, and there again when I went out again at 11pm to try for a second time to find flying squirrels (I failed to find the squirrels*). All in all, the sable was present around the guesthouse more-or-less continuously from about 7:30pm to 11:30pm. Therefore, though I realize I only have a single evening of data, I think that anyone planning on going to Hokkaido who would like to see sable would be well advised to consider booking a night or two at Papilio Guesthouse.

I also saw Sika deer, red fox, and Eurasian red squirrel as well as plenty of excellent birds. If you want a guide to help you find animals on Hokkaido I highly recommend Mark Brazil.

*I wish I had known last week what I found online just now: flying squirrel tours in Hokkaido at Lodge Lucky Field!

Finding Mammals around Hobart, Tasmania

May 20, 2022

I recently had an interesting experience in Tasmania. I was there for work, and I had to work every morning at the University of Tasmania, but then I had my afternoons and evenings free. The result was that I had lots of free time in which I could go searching for interesting animals – and Tasmania is excellent for wild mammals in particular – but I was tethered to Hobart, having to be back in the lab every morning. I stayed with some ecologist friends and they gave me many good tips and pointers for where to go in and around Hobart, which I thought I could share here.

Despite their ubiquity, it can be hard to get a picture of a pademelon that is not it hopping away.

Tasmanian Pademelon

For me, this is by far the easiest mammal to find in and around Hobart. Any grassy area is likely to have a pademelon or 20 grazing on it after dusk, and taking a flashlight and wandering around just about anywhere except the downtown core is likely to produce a pademelon sooner or later. For some concrete locations, try the Mount Nelson Signal Station or the Waterworks Reserve. I saw enough pademelons to qualify as a plague on the grassy slope that forms the dam wall at Waterworks.

Bennett’s Wallaby

Also common in and around Hobart, anywhere you’re likely to come across padymelons you’re also likely to see Bennett’s, though they are a little thinner on the ground. I saw maybe one Bennett’s for every ten padymelons. If I had to recommend one particular place, I’d say try the Waterworks reserve, particularly the grassy slope dam wall.

Long-nosed Potoroo

Hard to see anywhere, but apparently becoming more common on Bruny Island. I saw one driving the roads of North Bruny after dusk.

Eastern Bettong

Not the easiest animal to come across, but I saw two both times I visited the Truganini Reserve (walking in from the Mount Nelson Signal Station) after dark. I never saw them anywhere else, although someone I know saw one on the Mount Nelson oval while spotlighting.

Brushtail Possum

Australia’s version of a raccoon, they were common everywhere in suburbia, including suburban parks and bushland. Walking around suburbia at night is likely to produce at least one before long.

Tasmanian brushies are famous for their unusual colours, but unusually coloured ones are the minority. Most of the brushies I saw were the normal grey colour. If it’s unusually coloured ones you’re after, I think the black ones were most common at Knocklofty Reserve, while I saw a white one (aka “Golden Possum”) in the Truganini Reserve on one visit and across the street from the entrance (climbing a telephone pole outside someone’s house) on another.

Ringtail Possum

Common, although less so than the brushies. Searching any suburban bushland around Hobart should produce one eventually. I think I encountered them at the highest density at Knocklofty Reserve.

Krefft’s (formerly Sugar) Glider

Sparse but findable, I saw a least one per evening spotlighting at Truganini, Knocklofty, and Waterworks reserves.

Bare-nosed Wombat

Present, but in low numbers, around Hobart, and I don’t know of anywhere to see them in the immediate area. The closest place I know of would be Maria Island, where they are as close to guaranteed as any wild animal can be.

Platypus

The only place I know of around Hobart is the pool by the Cascade Brewery (-42.897011, 147.290514). I didn’t see it there, but I only waited a minute or so. Give it a couple hours, at least, if you really want to see it.

Eastern Barred Bandicoot

The more common of the two bandicoots in the area, they are findable at a lot of places, however the easiest place I know of to see them was the Mount Nelson oval, where they come out after dusk (and after any evening dogwalkers have gone home) to forage on the grass. A spotlight around the oval should produce several.

Southern Brown Bandicoot

I only saw one around Hobart, at the Knocklofty Reserve.

Dusky Antechinus

The only place I know of in the area with a good chance of seeing on is the Jurassic Garden at the Inala Reserve on Bruny Island. The garden is predator-proofed and this seems to have given the small mammals a reprieve. The one I saw was a real chonker and wandered around in broad daylight.

Swamp Antechinus

Again, easiest at Inala Reserve on Bruny Island. However, I’ve been told they are more common in the predator-proofed area that surrounds the Inala Cottage than the Jurassic Garden, so it might be worth booking a night in the cottage if you really want to see one.

Velvet-furred Rat

Apparently common in the Jurassic Garden at Inala, though I didn’t manage to see it in my (admittedly very short) 10 minute visit.

Eastern Quoll

Famously easy to see on Bruny Island, particularly North Bruny. A night of spotlighting the roads around North Bruny can easily produce double-digit numbers of them.

Spot-tailed Quoll

I’ve never seen any around Hobart, but someone mentioned to me that the tourist area at the top of Mt Wellington is a good spot for them. Apparently they come out after dark to forage through the trash bins.

Tasmanian Devil

Present around Hobart but in extremely low numbers. The closest place with a good chance of seeing them is Maria Island, where apparently there is a den under the tourist accommodation block. However, note they are introduced, not native, on Maria.

The closest place with at least a passable chance of seeing a native devil is the Tasman Peninsula, where diseased devils were removed and then healthy devils reintroduced. Someone I know was looking for masked owls and saw one cross a road on the peninsula (I didn’t get the precise location).

Thylacine

Extinct, but ubiquitous around Hobart in artwork, street art, branding, and licence plates. Any visitor to Hobart will see them everywhere.

Not finding animals around Trondheim, Norway

May 9, 2022

Recently I was spending a week in Trondheim, Norway, and tried desperately to find interesting animals. It should have been pretty straightforward; there are some really good spots for animals in the area. However, April is not the ideal time of year, things are far too frozen, and I mostly failed to find my target species. I did get some good local knowledge, though, so I thought I’d post what I heard - and what I did manage to find.

Muskox

The train station where you get off to look for musk ox.

The main draw in the area, for me at least, are the world’s most accessible wild muskox. Reintroduced to the alpine plateau of Dovrefjell, they can been seen relatively easily according to this website. Just hop on a train in Trondheim, hop off at Kongsvoll, and hike 3ish km! That is amazingly accessible for the world’s most remote northernly hoofed mammal.

However, note that all the pictures on that website appear to be taken in summer. In April, the place is snow covered and bleak. The train station is a the bottom of a gorge through the mountains, in mid-April I found it snowy but sunny and pleasant with a temperature around zero. That is not where the muskox live, however. They live on the plateau east of the gorge.

I took this picture standing at the train station at the bottom of the gorge, looking east. These buildings (which were locked up) mark the start of the muskox trail, which leads up the ridge behind the buildings and up onto the plateau beyond, where the musk ox live.

The first couple km of the muskox trail lead up the eastern wall of the gorge and over the ridge - not an easy stroll, especially in knee-deep snow. And once I got over the ridge, the temperature plummeted. This itself was not a big problem - I was dressed for this - but it does make the experience significantly less comfortable.

A view of the beech forest that covers the sides of the gorge that I hiked up. After this point my phone got too cold and stopped working, so there are no more pictures. The plateau looked the same as this, but without the trees.

I hiked along the Muskox trail towards the Høgsnyta lookout. Though muskox can be found anywhere along the trail, they are most commonly seen from the lookout (apparently). As I walked towards the lookout the wind picked up, and with it, snow squalls blocked my view to the point where, a few times, I had to stop and wait for them to die down because I couldn’t seen the ground through all the white and couldn’t tell if I was walking on flat ground or about to go over a cliff! So I never made it to the lookout, and I didn’t see any muskox.

Rock Ptarmigan

Here’s one I saw: I flushed on at the edge of the tree line while walking back to the train after my failed attempt to see the musk ox.

Mountain Hare

These are present in the forest that grows along the sides of the gorge. I saw three between my trips up and down the gorge. Other people also report seeing them, so it seems they’re pretty common at the site.

Reindeer

They exist in large herds in Dovrefjell but the movement of the herds is apparently unpredictable. Very hard to see.

Red Deer

Apparently common on Hitra Island, in particular around Sandstad. Unfortunately I didn’t make it to the island.

Roe Deer

Apparently also common on Hitra Island. I didn’t see them near Trondheim but I did see them hiking north of Sognsvann subway station in Oslo, on the hiking trail that runs along the eastern side of Sognsvann Lake.

Eurasian Beaver

The dam where you can see beavers was completely frozen over. I couldn’t even find any openings where the beavers might be coming up for air. It was just way too early in the season to be looking for them.

There is a well-known spot for beaver in Trondheim - several people pointed me to the same place. Theisendammen, on the western edge of the city, has a family of beavers, and apparently the best place to wait for them to appear is from the lookout platform at 63.420690, 10.344516. Again, however, I would recommend looking for them later than April, because the whole dam was still solidly covered with ice (and snow) when I visited. In Canada I’m used to looking for beavers in gaps in the ice of frozen ponds and lakes, but here there were no gaps, just solid ice.

Eurasian Otter

Otters are regular along the ocean shoreline in Trondheim, there were sightings while I was there. However, there don’t appear to be regular spots, you just have to luck upon one, and I never did.

Black Grouse & Western Capercaillie

Both are apparently common in Bymarka Nature Reserve, the hill to the east of Trondheim. I also heard a rumour that there is a population of Siberian Jays here. I took the tram to Lian Station and walked uphill, but didn’t luck upon any of these three.

Adder

I’ve seen pictures online from Norway and Sweden of adders out basking on snow in the spring, and I found them to be such a strange juxtaposition. I was hoping to see this phenomenon in person as someone gave me the location he’d seen an adder just a week before I arrived. Unfortunately there had been a lot of snowfall in the intervening week, and the site, 63.376644,10.285963, was not accessible without snowshoes (which I did not have).

White-throated Dipper

Let’s end on a happy note. This is one target animal I did manage to find in Trondheim. I’m not sure how common dippers are in urban environments, but I found this one at 63.431136, 10.363289, smack in the city night next to a construction site.

Finding Animals in Newfoundland

December 28, 2021

Newfoundland is a spectacularly beautiful (in a harsh, windswept sort-of a way) island off the northeast coast of North America. I spent late 2021 there at Memorial University in St. John's, and, as is my natural habit, I set out to find as many animals as I could in my spare time. I was there only in the fall, so keep that in mind with respect to my comments on where and how to find things. I'll also include any advice I got from people who seemed to know what they were talking about.

Mammals

Woodland Caribou

There are small numbers scattered all over the island, including on the Avalon Peninsula, but the only place I saw them was along Highway 430, the highway that goes up the Great Northern Peninsula to St. Anthony. I heard that the area around Port-au-Choix is a particular hotspot for them, but I didn't go there. I saw two herds just from the highway, one around Portland Creek and the other near Green Island Cove.

Red Fox

There's a habituated family on the road to Cape Spear, right where the asphalt road turns into gravel. They approach cars like they're used to being fed, so drive carefully!

Canadian Beaver

Newfoundland is pock-marked with ponds and lakes, and you drive by them constantly on the highways. Many, many of these ponds have active-looking beaver dams and staking one out for a while would probably yield successful beaver sightings. I didn't do this, and I didn't see any beavers just with quick glances at the lakes as I wizzed by at 100km/hr. The only beaver I saw was in a pond on the hike to Gros Morne Mountain.

Ermine

The only small weasel present on the island, they're found all over the island but aren't easy to see. The only place I saw one was at the picnic area by the pond at the Memorial University Botanical Gardens. It was foraging around like it was used to being fed.

River Otter

Once again, the only one I saw acted like it was used to being fed. It was in the farm pond on the Skerwink Train and swam over to us as we approached the pond. We stood there watching it, as it swam back and forth, periscoping and watching us.

Meadow Vole

There seem to be lots of these on the Great Northern Peninsula but I didn’t see an evidence of them anywhere else. On the Great Northern Peninsula, I saw them at both Cape Norman and Flower's Cove.

Mystery Vole

I saw a vole with a distinctly yellowish head running between boulders at the base of Gros Morne, where the climb up the gully starts. If I were on the mainland, I would have confidently said it was a rock vole, but apparently those don't occur on the island. And because the place I saw it is so accessible, and is part of a national park, I suspect it has been thoroughly sampled. If a population of rock voles lived there, it would be known. So I've just chalked this one up as unidentifiable.

Atlantic White-sided Dolphin

These seem to be relatively common. We went on a boat tour from the Bonavista Peninsula at the end of October and we found a super-pod of hundreds of them. The water all around the boat was boiling with them, it was an amazing sight. Apparently these super-pods are a fall occurrence, they are seen in smaller groups in the summer and can be hard to find in the spring.

I also saw a small pod of them looking out from my cabin near Carbonear, one of the Mad Rock Cabins. And I found a dead one washed up near St. Anthony.

White-beaked Dolphin

The Sea of Whales tour operator, who took us to see the white-sided dolphins, told us that spring is the time to see these around Bonavista, and he doesn't see them in the summer or fall.

I saw them only from the Cape Norman lighthouse on the Great Northern Peninsula, a well-known whale-watching spot. Their dorsal fins are so big that at a distance I had trouble telling them from (female) orcas!

Minke Whale

I saw these surface-feeding from the Cape Norman lighthouse, in association with the white-beaked dolphins. It was very neat to watch their huge mouths come out of the water and go along the surface.

Harbour Seals

Apparently they very common, but I noticed a distinct lack of seals the entire time I was in Newfoundland. People there absolutely hate seals; they get a lot of blame for keeping the cod stocks from recovering, and I suspect seals are harassed in a lot of places. This was particularly apparent when I took the ferry to St Pierre and immediately spotted seals hauled out around the harbour there.

On Newfoundland itself, just about the only place I found seals is around the southern end of the Avalon Peninsula, in particular in the harbours along the Irish Loop.

Hooded Seals

These were the only seals I found that were not habour seals. I saw a few of these hauled out with some harbour seals at the Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, at the first point where the trail to Watern Cove looks out over the shoreline. I’m not sure if they’re regular there, I was there after a big storm and they might have just been resting up. Also, this is a famous location for Ediacaran fossils, unfortunately the places they are visible are only accessible on guided tour.

Birds

There are too many birds to list and discuss. My full list for Newfoundland can be found on my eBird profile here. It's lacking the most famous bird for the area - Atlantic puffin - as they move offshore outside the breeding season.

Newfoundland gets lots of vagrants. There were several warblers, some rare even for Canada, hanging around into December. I didn't chase them down, but if you're into that sort of thing it'd be worth checking out eBird, the Newfoundland Birders Google Group, and Jared Clarke's Twitter to see what's around.

Bald Eagle

Common soaring around the coast and over the highways, even a long way inland (probably because of all the ponds and lakes), but definitely not as easy to find as on the coast of British Columbia or Alaska. The whale watching tour out of Bonavista (Sea of Whales) took us to an active nest.

Rock Ptarmigan

Just about the only place you can find them is on the peaks of the Long Range Mountains in western Newfoundland, and just about the only accessible peak is Gros Morne. I was pleasantly surprised to see lots of them - upwards of 20 - while walking across the plateau. Not sure if that's normal or if its been a particularly good year for them.

Boreal Chickadee

I rarely see these elsewhere in Canada, so it was a pleasure to discover that they are probably the most common forest bird on the Avalon Peninsula, where the black-capped chickadee is rare. Further west on the island the black-capped gets progressively more common and the boreal harder to see.

White-winged Crossbill

Common across the island wherever there are conifers. A rare treat for me elsewhere in Canada, it was great to see them so frequently.

Northern Fulmar

Hard to see. I saw them once from shore after a big storm, and once from the ferry to St Pierre.

Dovekie

Easy to see from shore in the late fall and winter. Very hard otherwise.

Reptiles

What reptiles? I didn't see a single reptile my entire time there, because there are almost none in Newfoundland. However, according to Sea of Whales, leatherback turtles seem to be getting more regular, to the point where it might just be possible to target them on a trip.

Amphibians

There aren't any amphibians native to Newfoundland, and the introduced ones are suprisingly hard to come across, despite the abundance of fresh water. I only saw green frogs and American toads once - driving along Route 73 at night during a rainstorm.

Other

Strombolites!

There are only a small handful of places in the world where strombolites exist. I had no idea that western Newfoundland was one of those places until I drove past a small, unassuming sign for a "strombolite walk" at Flower's Cove. These have to be the least promoted strombolites in the world. If you have the time, check them out! They are rare, weird, and totally underappreciated.

Some comments on stuff I didn't see

Orca - Sea of Whales tour operator out of Bonavista targets these in the fall, after the migratory whales have gone. But he still only sees them about once in every four trips. Gotta get lucky!

Seals - I was hoping to see bearded, harp, and ringed seals during my time on Newfoundland, but given how hard harbour seals were to find, I didn't maintain much hope. Apparently harp seals regularly haul up at some harbours (I was told Holyrood is a good spot) during the dead of winter. They are also regular in early spring on the ice that flows down from Labrador along the north shore. Bearded seals are uncommon and erratic but turn up regularly, apparently. Ringed seals are either very rare or are overlooked because they look so much like harbour seals.

Muskrat - Apparently there's been a steep decline in their population recently, and it's currently unknown why. They used to be very common but are now almost impossible to see.

Arctic Hare - Present only on the most barren tundra-like spots. I looked for them on top of Gros Mourne and at Burnt Cape Ecological Reserve but wasn't lucky enough to see one.

Willow Ptarmigan - Present all over the island but hard to see. Their population follows boom-and-bust cycles and I think I was there at a low ebb. I looked in several known spots and couldn't come up with one.

Leatherback Turtle - I was surprised to see pictures of these featured prominently on the websites of whale watching companies. It seems they are becoming a regular thing, which is very neat. The Sea of Whales boat tour out of Bonavista said he sees them mostly August-October and will see about one a week during that time. Not great odds, but a lot better than I was expecting! A biologist I talked to in Terra Nova National Parks also said he thinks they're becoming more regular in Newfoundland waters and suspects global warming may be responsible.

Anyone up for a camera trap mystery?

August 9, 2021

A camera trap at my parent’s property near Burks Falls, Ontario captured this series of images:

The first three images show a large, dark animal moving through the trees, the fourth is a picture with no animals for comparison. Here they are as a gif:

After staring at this gif for way too long, I’m pretty sure I know what animal this is. Anyone else want to hazard a guess?

Update Oct. 2021: It’s a moose.