During my annual 2024 February Hokkaido photography tour, I photographed evidence that not only visiting raptors like the Steller’s Sea Eagle (Haliaeetus pelagicus) from the Kamchatka peninsula can become separated from their customary winter destinations. A couple of years ago, a Steller’s Sea Eagle was spotted and photographed in the United States and Canada. Their home region has remained unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years or three ice ages. The majority of Steller’s Sea Eagles migrate to Japan starting in autumn and remain in their winter home until late winter/early spring, then returning to eastern Siberia in the first weeks of March, but this date varies depending on the ice floes. The migration is not a day or two, it’s closer to a month’s migration time back and forth. They are the perfect predators, just like the vikings of ages past, but circumstances took that one Steller’s Sea eagle a couple of years back far off course, wandering North America.  

In mid-December, I was going over field journal reports from the Ornithological Society for rare bird sightings across Japan, when I came across a White-naped crane (Antigone vipio) spotted in Hokkaido feeding and roosting with Red-crowned cranes (Grus japonensis). Fast forward to mid-February, while leading my annual Hokkaido photo tour, participants and I were visiting and photographing the Red-crowned cranes in the Hokkaido Kushiro Shitsugen National Park when participants from the USA noticed a member of the flock with a different body and coloration. They called me over and asked if it was a juvenile or another type of bird.  My first thought was, “Could this be that surprise performer among the snow ballerinas?” My birding instincts surpassed my curiosity, and I took a few dozen photos making sure I was documenting the visit, realizing that in my more than two decades traveling across Japan photographing, I had spotted and photographed this crane before in winter but much further south in the Kansai region of Japan in the Tottori and Shimane prefectures. Before giving an identification, I pored over my online field guides and online library, and that’s when I knew precisely we were spotting and photographing the White-naped crane.

As with all cranes, they are large birds, being 112-125 cm (44-49 inches) long, and around 130 cm (4.3 ft) tall; they weigh about 5.7 kg (12 lbs); they have pinkish legs, grey, and white striped neck with a red face patch.  These birds breed in northeastern Mongolia, northeastern China, and parts of Russia.  During winter they normally migrate to the Yangtze River, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, Kyushu Japan, Kazakhstan, and Taiwan which is why I encountered them near Kansai, as that is part of the migratory route south. The White-naped crane is not the only member of the resurrected Antigone genus.  There are three other cranes: the Sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis), the Sarus crane (Antigone antigone), and the Brolga (Antigone rubicunda). Compared to the slightly less than 3,300 Red-crowned crane population spread through Asia that I regularly photograph on my annual Hokkaido birding photo tour, there are under 5,000 White-naped cranes remaining in the wild and are listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a threatened species. 

After spotting and photographing this White-naped crane in Hokkaido, I have scheduled a week in autumn during their migration into Japan, to photograph these lovely cranes in a flock.  You never know I might spot a Red-crowned crane in South Japan, but I doubt it, but one never knows?