Bandai-bashi over the Hino River

I took my art class to the river again today to sketch birds and mountains. It was beautifully overcast — the perfect amount of light to make the river glow an emerald blue — with a cool breeze that brought the wonderful smells of flowers, wet grass, and burnt cypress along with it.

One of my students recognized the mysterious white bird that I posted about last week. She said its a sekirei, and checking my Japanese-English dictionary that turns out to be a wagtail. What an appropriate name!

Well, according to Wikipedia, its name is actually a mistranslation of its Latin name motacilla, but “wag-tail” is far more fitting than the Latin “little mover” due to the very distinctive tail bobbing it does every time it moves.

Judging by the distinctive eye stripe I would guess it is a Japanese pied wagtail: Motacilla albis lugens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wagtail)

I had been wondering what they were ever since I came here, as I had never seen them in North America. Unfortunately people rarely know the answers to the weird questions I ask (like “what species of bird is that?”) but today I was just lucky.