Below are various wildlife images that “I call wildlife shots with personality”!

Interestingly when most city people imagine crows, they think of them in a cityscape environment, but I am not a city person and I have had many experiences spotting and photographing them along side Steller’s Sea Eagles (Haliaeetus pelagicus) (Japanese オオワシ (Oowashi)) vigilantly watching for a scrap of prey to escape unnoticed so it can swoop down and collect it.  At our country side beach home, crows, and dozens of other birds visit on a daily basis, and they are all welcome, but from time to time, I watch out for crows that are hunting sparrows in our 100 year old cherry blossom tree, and I chase them off.   However, in Tokyo a former governor created a Taskforce to destroy nests and outright eliminate crows.  However, the reason why the Jungle Crow numbers were increasing was due to trash left out in the open, waiting for garbage trucks to pick it up.  And these bags were easily broken open and combed over by the curious crows for delicious morsels, and the rise in concentration of Tokyo metropolitan residents was steadily contributing to the problem.  Finding the aggressive method only moderately successful, the government decided to hand out blue nets to communities that did not have commercial garbage bins, these nets were distributed to cover trash left on the street for pick-up making it more difficult for crows to break into the garbage bags for food.  Jungle crows in Japan are most widely renowned for their ingenuity in cracking nuts with the unwitting cooperation of humans in the communities in which they live.  Rather than spend the energy needed to crack open a nut with their own beaks, the crows find a well-trafficked roadway and place the nut they want to eat along the road where the tires of passing cars will strike the nut and break it open for them.  If the initial placement is incorrect, or if the cars miss it, the crow will then move the nut to a different location in hopes of a different car doing all the work for it or simply drop it while perched on a nearby power line.  On a recent Hokkaido nature birding tour, however, I saw a clever crow wait for a battle to break out between Steller’s Sea Eagles and White-tailed Eagles (Haliaeetus albicilla) (Japanese オジロワシ (Ojirowashi)) over caught prey, waiting for an opportune moment to steal away the catch and then make itself scarce to enjoy its ill gotten prize. Crows and ravens on the pack-ice squawk back at the Steller's Sea Eagles and take a stand but quickly and smartly back off for fear of incurring the prehistoric raptor’s wrath.   Some smaller fish are trapped in river inlets during low tide, so crows and ravens are able to catch and enjoy fresh fish, their palate resembling those of the Glaucous gulls (Larus hyperboreus), (Japanese ユリカモメ (yurikamome)) along the Hokkaido coastline.  Due to the fierce territorial nature of another of Hokkaido’s winter residents, the Red-crowned crane (Grus japonensis), Japanese タンチョウ (tanchou)), crows do not try to mix into their flocks for the purpose of feeding.  In my 30 years leading my annual Hokkaido birding photo tours, I have never seen a Steller's Sea eagle catching and eating a raven, but I have seen the Steller's Sea eagle, an ice age relic that has survived three ice ages without the need to evolve, catch seagulls when the fishing is slow.