The Shima Enaga (Aegithalos caudatus japonicus) are super sweetheart birds, my beloved bonny birds.  These adorable birds appear like little bouncing snowballs with a cotton white face; they are truly heart melting to spot, view, and photograph.  Being raised in Northern Canada in the polar region capital of the world, Hokkaido naturally feels like home, and it happens to be my second home.  I would make it my first home, but my family prefers the temperate climate of the Tokyo region, so I spend as much time throughout the year in Hokkaido as possible, about three months plus annually.  For the past 25 years, I have had the good fortune of exploring Hokkaido in all four seasons, and I always look forward to my annual Hokkaido photo tour workshop.  On this Hokkaido adventure, participants get not only to photograph the Steller’s Sea Eagle (Haliaeetus pelagicus), White-tailed eagles (Haliaeetus albicilla), Red-crowned cranes (Grus japonensis), and various other species, but they also get a front row seat up close and personal with the snow fairies.  All of these birds are amazing specimens and make for once in a lifetime photo ops, but between you and me, my all-time favorite bird to spot and photograph is Hokkaido’s adorable snow fairy the Shima enaga, a subspecies of the long-tailed bushtit; they are also known as the silver-throated tit or silver-throated dasher.  Females and males are identical, and they are a pocket-sized bird (at 12 -16 cm in length, including their tail at 7- 9 cm).

The Shima enaga are fairly common in Hokkaido, but finding them at a location where you can photograph them is difficult.  And this year, over 90% of my colleagues and friends that I spoke with didn’t spot them, but as usual, participants on my Hokkaido photo tour did.  Usually, we get one or two mornings spotting and photographing the Shima enaga, but this year was a snow fairies bonanza.  We got five full mornings of spotting and photographing them during morning tea or for some, morning coffee and breakfast.  Outside of the breeding season, the Shima enaga live in flocks of ten to twenty birds comprising parents and offspring.  Stray birds from other flocks sometimes join and take over parenting roles with other adult birds, helping to raise the brood.  Bushtits as a species are territorial and will protect their territory against neighboring flocks.  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 protonym has been split from the Aegithalidae and became a distinct family containing three sub-group families.  Aegithalos (long-tailed tits) Psaltriparus (North America Bushtit), monotypic; Psaltriparus (Pygmy Bushtit), monotypic.  As the newsletter name suggests, there are different subspecies of long-tailed bushtits, but the last recorded photograph of a snow fairy outside Japan’s north island was over a decade ago, in spite of these beautiful fluffy birds inhabiting the entire Palearctic realm.  As I mentioned before, approximately 99% live in Hokkaido, Japan.  Their diet reflects their expansive distribution.  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. The Shima Enaga also feeds on a wide variety of tiny insects, dining on leafhoppers, treehoppers, aphids, and caterpillars. The Shima Enaga's diet adapts to the season in which it is foraging.  Wasps, ants, spiders, eggs, and pupae are a variety of insects on the Shima Enaga's seasonal menu.