Visiting the Kushiro Wetlands is always part of my annual Hokkaido Winter Birding Photography Workshop.  In Hokkaido, I chase the light capturing avian wildlife such as Steller’s Sea Eagles, Blakiston’s Fish Owls, Shima Enaga, Glaucous Gulls, and many others.  Winged residents I look forward to photograph the most on my Hokkaido Wildlife Photo Tour visit are the Red-crowned cranes some of whom are endemic, sub-regional, and several hundred that are known to migrate similar to the Steller’s Sea Eagles that escape the polar vortex of a Siberian winter.  Situated on the Eastern coast of Hokkaido, the wetlands are where the Red-crowned Cranes roost during the winter when the migratory flock joins the resident flock on Japan’s northern island.  There are several waterways that the Red-crowned Cranes roost in as they prefer standing in shallow water that doesn’t go past their heels, not too deep or too shallow, and the Red-crowned Cranes prefer clearings surrounding their roosting waterways reaching 50 - 100 feet to provide the cranes a good view for predators.  The areas where the Red-crowned Cranes roost also provide amazing photo ops for natural landscapes with the densely-wooded oak forests that hem in the area, almost providing a natural enclosure for the Red-crowned Cranes to settle in and refresh after a long day of foraging.  The best time to photograph the Red-crowned Cranes at their roost is just before the morning golden hour, so if you want a photo similar to the one below you are going to miss your warm breakfast and wait for the sunrise.  At this spot, you have to wait for about an hour for the sunlight to hit the trees and melt the frost, then the Red-crowned Cranes will awaken.

The Kushiro Wetlands are especially significant to birding in Japan because it is the location where the Red-crowned Crane was brought back from near extinction.  Due to overhunting and human-made changes to their habitat, the cranes were thought to be a casualty of man’s encroachment on nature, but during the Taisho Era in 1926, a small flock was discovered, and their preservation began.  The Red-crowned Crane is still on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Endangered list, so that makes photographing their snow ballet all the more rare and sought after.  I respect all wildlife and make sure that my participants and I have minimal impact on all the areas that we visit so that many more people may see the choreographed beauty that is the Red-crowned Cranes dance.

In February 2020, my participants, professional colleagues, and friends were able to capture even more than the Red-crowned Cranes choreographed ballet.   While a friend of mine and photographer from the leading Japanese News Agency was photographing next to me, we waited in the biting cold of -25 to -30 °C that morning.  We braved the elements for over an hour, and we thought our prize was seeing the sunlight melt the frost off the trees as seen in the cover image on this newsletter.  Then cranes started moving a little towards us, and we thought they were going to take flight from the roost to the feeding grounds, but to our amazement, we were allowed to view and photograph a rare encounter with Red-crowned Cranes, mating in the golden hour as you can see in the video below.  ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’  At the 17 second mark, you can hear my friend expressing his unbridled excitement as he had never witnessed that before.  Immediately after snapping his photos, as you can hear his motor drive, he said, “See-ya,” and headed into town.  One of the images he took was published the following day across Japan and internationally.  This video was shot just as the corona pandemic was taking its effect on the world, but in Hokkaido, the region we were in, was covid-free.  And you can read more about Hokkaido and the Covid-19 pandemic in my article published on the Luminous Landscape website about my annual Hokkaido Wildlife Photography Expedition Workshop, February 2020.

Luminous Landscape Article Link