Shima Enaga - A Bonny Bird

I love my second home in Hokkaido, Japan because it allows me to take amazing birding photos, especially in winter. This is the best time to photograph the Shima Enaga, birds that look like bouncing miniature snowballs, and their face is as white as a cotton ball. The Shima Enaga is a subspecies of the long-tailed bushtit. They are also known as the silver-throated tit or silver-throated dasher. They are a tiny bird (at 12-16 cm in length, including their tail at 7-9 cm). Males and females are identical. You will often hear Shima Enaga before you see them; they have a constant and high pitched call. Outside of the breeding season, they live in flocks of 10 - 20 birds, the flock mostly composed of parents and offspring; they like to stick together. Wondering birds from other flocks sometimes join, and together with other adult birds, they help raise the brood. These birds are highly territorial and will protect their territory against neighboring flocks. If you want to photograph the Shima Enaga, you should get to Hokkaido, Japan. These beautiful, fluffy birds also inhabit the entire Palearctic realm, but as I mentioned before, they occur mostly in Hokkaido, Japan. Females from spring to autumn tend to wander into neighboring territories, while males remain within their winter territories. The Shima Enaga was first classified as a tit of the Parus group. The Parus has been split from the Aegithalidae and becoming a distinct family containing three sub-group families. Aegithalos (long-tailed tits) are five species birds with a tail. Psaltriparus (North America Bushtit), monotypic. Psaltriparus (pygmy bushtit), monotypic.

The Shima Enaga is insectivorous all year long. They mainly eat arthropods predominantly and prefer the eggs and astronomical giant moths and butterflies, but sometimes they will eat vegetable matter. When photographing these beautiful fluffy pure white bonny of a bird, I suggest a super-telephoto lens. 600mm f4 is good, with a 1.2x or 1.4x, or even an x2 telecenter for those up close and personal encounters. Myself I prefer to use a 300 f2.8 or a 400mm f2.8 with a 2x telecenter, or my Nikon 800mm with a 1.2x teleconverter.