Japan's Winter Wilidlife - Winter 2007Winter in Japan is always interesting and never fails to produce wonderful imagery! Steve Freno (Alaskan Photo Tours), Shinji Sato (our Japanese guide), and myself led 10 participants on this latest Japan Winter Wildlife Tour. Our first stop was in the mountains of Honshu for the always adorable Japanese Snow Monkey. This winter has been extremely warm on the main island and the mountains didn’t get their first snow until just one week before we arrive. Our luck continued as we arrived for our first day of shooting, the Snow Monkey Gods opened up the snowy skies and we spent the first afternoon photographing snow monkeys with huge, white snow flakes coming down... it couldn’t get any better! The other three days with the monkeys gave us cloudy bright and sunny days to add to the image variety. One big advantage for us this year was the waterfall that is usually frozen under the walking bridge was really flowing, allowing us to get some wonderful pictures of snow monkeys with a silky waterfall in the background.
Next stop for us was the north island of Hokkaido. After landing in Hokkaido we went directly to a wonderful lake which was full of Whooper Swans and other waterfowl. We even saw a Northern Goshawk make an attempt to capture a duck off the water... no, sorry to say I didn’t get a shot since I was shooting swans with my wide angle lens... rats! Our first three days we spent photographing the magnificent Stellar’s Sea Eagle. Weather was a little rough the first day, so we spent our time photographing the Eagles as they sat in trees along the coast and valleys near the town of Rausa. Our second two days we photographed the eagles from two boats we chartered to go into the pack ice in the Sea of Japan. This is always my favorite part of this trip. To see these amazing eagles sitting on the beautiful pack ice with the steep landscape of Hokkaido as a backdrop is breathtaking.
After getting our fill of Stellar’s Sea Eagles and Whooper Swans, we headed southwest toward the town of Kushiro to spend three days with the dancing Red-crowned Cranes. It’s no wonder way these graceful, six foot tall, majestic birds are rooted in the art and culture of Japan. We spent three sunrises watching a hundred or more cranes at one of their roosting rivers as they started to call and dance in the mist covered waters. Late morning and afternoons we spent at several locations watching and photographing the cranes as they flew in formation and paired off to perform their courtship dance, typical of all the crane species. Like most of Japan’s wildlife, the cranes need extra food from humans during the cold winter months and the feeding of fish to the cranes provided one of the most exciting photographic moments of the trip. While a man from the Crane foundation brought fish out to the cranes, White-tailed eagles as well as a couple Stellar’s eagles came out of the trees to dive bomb the cranes in hopes of picking up fish off the snow. This excitement only lasted for about 10 minutes, but we all burned up some serious memory cards in that time frame! Too fun!
Steve, Shinji, and I will be putting on the same trip again next year, so if you are interested please shoot me an email. I expect this trip to fill quickly... so don’t wait too long to commit.
Regards
Roy Toft
Other Recent TripsClick on the thumbnail image to view a short report of my recent trip.
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