Weedon’s World
In the 1990s, Mike left Japan with one lasting regret. This January, he returned to Hokkaido hoping to put matters right
How a recent birdwatching trip to Japan yielded Mike a great find!
Ihave just got back from the winter wonderland of eastern Hokkaido, the northernmost of the main islands of Japan. It was a trip of great nostalgia for me; in the mid-1990s, I spent a year or so as a research fellow at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, the island’s main city, which is in the west. This was the first time I have returned to Japan since those glory days of my short academic career. Hokkaido is probably the easiest of the Japanese islands to explore, with lots of open country, lots of wild spaces, and a relatively sparse population, compared to the main island, Honshu. Jo and I launched a few expeditions at different times of year, to explore the island by car, and made a few trips to the east, which is renowned for Red-crowned Cranes, Steller’s Sea Eagles and wintering Whooper Swans. Naturally, we saw just about all the amazing wildlife spectacles that the region is rightly renowned for. But those were the pre-digital days, and the only cameras we had were old school compact film cameras and an SLR with a 50mm lens. So, the incredible photographic opportunities eastern Hokkaido presents were somewhat wasted on us, back in the day. Lack of bird photographs was not my biggest regret, on leaving Japan in 1997, though. It was not setting eyes on the real ‘big one’, the majestic and oh-so-rare Blakiston’s Fish Owl, the world’s heaviest owl and one of the rarest birds breeding on Hokkaido. In fact there are probably only 20 or so pairs breeding on the island and they have very specific habitat requirement (for particular unfrozen, fish-rich streams). It was not as if we didn’t want to see one with all our heart, or that we didn’t try. It is just that things were different, then. When I arrived in Japan in 1996, I was armed with a site guide called A Birder’s Guide to Japan by Jane Washburn Robinson (only later did I get the Mark Brazil equivalent site guide). So, I naturally devoured every word that Washburn Robinson had to say about Hokkaido birding. And she had some particularly strong things to say concerning searching for my heart’s desire, the magical fish owl. In a nutshell, don’t go asking the locals directly about where to look for Blakiston’s Fish Owls. Her advice left our impressionable young souls terrified. Take this quotation: “There are some notorious tales of what happened to certain people who have shown too much interest in these birds.” Even when we stayed at one of the places JWR recommended and were greeted by a huge, largerthan-life-size painted ‘mural’ of a spread-winged BFO in our hosts’ sitting room, we had the words of warning ringing in our ears and backed off from asking where to search. But times have changed. Now, there are established hides, where the wonderful owls will come to floodlit pools to feed, just about nightly. On my second evening in Hokkaido in January this year, our little group visited one of these comfortable and excellent hides in the fishing town of Rausu, on the east side of the wonderful Shiretoko peninsula. The hide, we were told, almost guarantees a visit from at least one Blakiston’s Fish Owl. So, I had high hopes of finally seeing one of these ‘great birds of the world’ which can apparently weigh up to four times as much as an Eagle Owl! And not only was a sighting likely, but there was a real opportunity to take photographs. The hide has a very clever lighting system, which appears to subtly light a little fishing pool in the stream (so there is no need for disturbing flash photography). In fact, the system works on fast pulses of light, which fool the eye of human and owl into appearing to be continuous light, but mean you can ‘freeze’ the action with a camera, easily. We arrived in a bit of a blizzard as the sun set and there was the inevitable slightly stressful wait, worrying if the snow would put off the owls from coming to the regular pool. But needless to say, at about 5.10pm, a beautiful male Blakiston’s Fish Owl swept in from the left, and perched on a snow-covered rock at the edge of the pool. A few seconds later, it opened its wings, jumped and plunged feet first into the water, emerging with a small fish it soon consumed. A further few minutes after this it repeated the operation, but having subdued the fish, carried it off to its (unseen) mate. And I could breathe again! I had finally laid to rest two decades of frustration and regret. And no ‘notorious tales’ need be told of what happened to me. Or the owl.
Now, there are established hides, where the owls come to flood-lit pools to feed