2008 Tour Narrative
In Brief: The list of highlights from our winter 2008 tour to Japan just goes on and on: there were all those gulls to study, including a superb adult Pallas’s Gull, plus such mouth-watering species as Spectacled and Pigeon Guillemots, Crested Auklet, Ancient Murrelet, Oriental Turtle Dove, Dusky Thrush, Olive-backed Pipit, and Orange-flanked Bush-Robin. Local specialties included Ryukyu Minivet, Japanese Wagtail, Brown Dipper, Pale and Brown-headed Thrushes, Varied Tit, and Gray Bunting. On top of all this we had the Fergus Crystal experience! From the very start, he treated us to full explanations of bath etiquette, local customs, clothing, food, and language; Fergus’s passion and his knowledge of the country is simply astounding. Not only did his fluent Japanese make everything from internal flights to hotel check-ins run smoothly, he was always on hand to identify food and explain how it should be eaten! Aside from all of this, Fergus is also a superb birder with an incredible taxonomic knowledge and fantastic hearing. It all added up to an unforgettable experience in Japan.
In Detail: On any other trip, a phone call to the leader’s room at 3am would not normally be a good thing, but Japan is different! The phone call was to let us know that the Blakiston’s Fish Owl was at the hotel pond, visible from every one of our rooms, and after a quick knock on doors we were all watching the owl, fluffed up like a large square box of feathers; we even saw it catch a fish. This trip blew out of the water any initial worries about this sometimes difficult species: our first evening rewarded us with one perched on top of a telephone tower, followed by the middle-of-the-night sighting at our hotel. After that, the pressure was off and we just couldn’t stop seeing these owls, with 3 perched in a single scope view, beautiful listens to a pair duetting, and to cap it all off, one sat by the pond throughout our dinner and checklist (and eventually left the pond after 2 hours, meaning that Bird of the Trip was settled!). This was just one of many highlights on Hokkaido, where the temperature dropped to -8ºF one morning while we watched Red-crowned Cranes settled in the “warm” waters of their overnight roost.
We also recorded Steller’s Sea Eagle on no less than 5 days, with a maximum daily count of 330 and some simply stunning encounters out on the sea ice, where cameras and extremities were pushed to the limit by the cold. Similar breathtaking experiences were had with White-tailed Eagles and Red-crowned Cranes at one of the feeding stations. The coastline of Hokkaido was stacked with ducks, and we saw hundreds of Harlequins, Black and Asian White-winged Scoters, and Long-tailed Ducks, complementing a waterfowl list that already included both Whooper and Bewick’s Swans, more than 25,000 Pintail, and some beautiful Smews and Common Mergansers.
Even before all of this, we had managed to cram in so much, our several days on Kyushu rewarding us with thousands of Hooded Cranes mixed in with hundreds of White-naped and several Commons. Nearby we saw White’s Thrush, Long-billed Plover, Black-faced Spoonbill, Saunders’s Gull, and a fine drake Falcated Duck. Around Miike we were treated to another showy White’s Thrush, a flock of Baikal Teal, and the diminutive Japanese Pygmy Woodpecker.
Honshu highlights included the fabulous birdfeeders in the mountains, where hundreds of Japanese Grosbeaks, Hawfinches, and Asian Rosy-Finches made braving the snow well worth it. We also caught up with Japanese Woodpecker and Copper Pheasant, and on one day we visited the famous Onsen, where Japanese Macaques come to bathe. The Onsens are popular with more than just the macaques, and there can be few more relaxing ways to finish a winter’s day birding than sitting in a hot bath, in the snow, where it would have been possible to listen to Blakiston’s Fish Owls calling (had we not already been scoping them from around the corner!).
James Lidster
Updated: March 2008