Birds of Japan
It was a birding adventure with a difference for Dominic Couzens, who visited Japan to enjoy the many avian delights this beautiful country has to offer…
Dominic Couzens visits Japan to enjoy the many great birds this country has to offer
Surveying the scene – huge reedbeds stretching out in front of us with open water beyond, the arrow-shaped formations of ducks flying in the distance, harriers quartering just ahead and wagtails calling from the wires up above – Jon Dunn said: “You know, this could be Minsmere.” He was right, and for the twentieth time already today, I pinched myself.
No, this wasn’t Minsmere. We were a very long way from the famous Suffolk reserve; we were just outside Tokyo.
The harriers were Eastern Marsh Harriers, some of the ducks were Eastern Spotbills and the wagtail – it was the very splendid Japanese Wagtail, which looks like a Pied Wagtail wearing a tuxedo for a night out. On the other hand, though, a (Western) Osprey was fishing out over the water, a Reed Bunting was calling, and Carrion Crows sauntered over the neighbouring fields.
One moment the view through the binoculars was strikingly familiar, the next it was joltingly different.
This heady mixture of the exotic and everyday characterises birding in Japan – and indeed many things in this astonishing country. There are shops, motorways, street-lights and you drive on the left; as we found out, there is rain, too, and autumn colour, hill trails and hotels.
But there are also shoes for every occasion, communal baths, chopsticks and public toilets with multiple mysterious functions. You smile, but you also bow. For a moment you understand your surroundings, the next you are plunged into confusion. Japan offers a joyous cornucopia of experiences; it is half in this world, and very definitely half out of it. When you are watching a Lapwing, you know that a Meadow Bunting isn’t far away. This is the land of the pinching thumb.
I had been invited, along with my fellow writer Jon, to Japan for a birding adventure with a difference. It was December, but we wouldn’t be seeing monkeys or cranes or Steller’s Sea Eagles, as most eco-tourists do. Instead, for a
week or so we would be following the country’s newly established Diamond Route, a voyage designed to usher visitors into some of Japan’s less abundantly foot-fallen prefectures (equivalent to counties) – Ibaraki, Tochigi and Fukushima. Our mission was to see what these areas might be like for birding, but also to be immersed in Japan’s unique culture and history.
Endemics and more
As far as birds were concerned, Lake Kasumigaura (Ibaraki) gave us a riproaring start. It is the country’s secondlargest lake, and around the shoreline there is an abundance of different habitats. At one corner, at a spot called Edosaki, a flock of Taiga Bean Geese had taken up winter residence on some fields that looked no different from any of the others nearby. We parked next to a broad canal which held an array of good ‘British’ wintering birds: Black-necked,
Little and Great Crested Grebes, Coots, Mallards and Little Egrets, while on the overhead wires was an eclectic flock of small birds: Tree Sparrows, which replace House Sparrows in much of eastern Asia, and Grey-capped Greenfinches, which are similar to, but pleasingly different, to those familiar to us. They have a brown mantle. We also caught a glimpse of a Japanese Pheasant, endemic to this country.
Elsewhere, we enjoyed something of a bunting-fest, with Black-faced at Ukishima (which hosts the gorgeous Japanese Reed Bunting in the summer) and the super-smart Meadow Bunting at the splendidly-named Nishinoshu, a place-name that would surely perfectly fit a Japanese restaurant. Other good birds around this area of fields, paddies and marshes included Buff-bellied Pipit, White-cheeked Starling, Bull-headed Shrike and many Dusky Thrushes.
The latter, which are winter visitors in variable numbers to Japan, soon proved themselves to be one of the commonest birds. I even heard one calling later in the trip while I was indulging in an outdoor onsen, the communal bath which is a national institution.
The following day kept us in Ibaraki, with a quick trip to the Pacific coast at the seaside town of Hiraiso. We were only scheduled a short stop, but that was enough us to be immersed in some utterly sublime seawatching. Imagine you were to look off the Norfolk coastline and everything was suddenly different, even though the leaden waves, cold dark rocks and stark breakwaters looked just the same. Every distant dot and huddled floating blob was a thrill to behold.
Three blobs turned out to be Harlequin Ducks, the males with steel-blue and rufous plumage splattered with white blobs, making each of them look like floating modern art.
Two Black Scoters and a Red-breasted
Merganser flew by, while Greater Scaup, Wigeon and Eastern Spot-billed Ducks sheltered in the harbour. A Pelagic Cormorant dived offshore while, perched on a reef, Temminck’s Cormorants dried their wings. Even the gulls were Not Your Average; they were Black-tailed Gulls and Vega Gulls, no less.
Vega looks like Herring Gull, but the medium-sized Black-tailed is refreshingly refined, with a dark grey mantle, black tail band and a long yellow bill with a blobby black tip. This might not send shivers down your spine, but these gulls were, for us, gloriously, far-away Asiatic and ecstasy-inducing.
Japanese garden
The town of Mito lies just inland, and our first dollop of culture came from a visit to nearby Kairakuen, which is one of the Three Great Gardens of Japan (the others are in Okayama and Kanazawa). This one opened in 1841, most unusually as a public garden. Although it was December and the best colour had passed, many of the trees and shrubs were still ablaze with the embers of autumn.
It was so neat and tidy that you could imagine that the whole garden was dressed up to please an exacting aunt, the bonsai evergreens clipped, the gravel paths raked and the patterns perfect.
The buildings dotted around (we needed different shoes for every one) were all reverentially swept clean; even the piped music was timelessly peaceful. The garden also held some birds, including Japanese White-eye, Japanese Tit, Hawfinch, Brown-eared Bulbul (the world’s most northerly of its family), lots of Dusky Thrushes and two colourful gems: Daurian Redstart and the lovely Varied Tit. We transferred inland to Toshigi prefecture and to a completely different landscape, both in the environmental and birding sense.
The tapestry of upland mixed forests, rivers, swamps and lakes was easy on the eye, but the birding got much harder. On our third morning, we awoke to a thin carpet of snow at our hillside hotel near Nikko. Small flocks of Dusky Thrushes moved through the trees, as well as the odd party of Hawfinches. Some careful searching revealed Japanese, Willow and Long-tailed Tits working the bare branches, but the biggest delight came in the diminutive form of the Japanese Pygmy Woodpecker. Imagine a fairly common and tame version of the Lesser Spotted, albeit with greyish markings on the head. This species entertained us several times over the next few days.
The lakes and rivers of the Nikko
National Park hold a range of good species. The lakes are full of diving ducks, including Goldeneye, Goosander and Smew, while the rivers play host to some great birds, one of which we saw and one we missed. We enjoyed encounters with several Asiatic Dippers, which differ from ours in being entirely brown apart from a white eye-ring. They gave great value, allowing a close approach, singing (which is not unusual for Dippers in the winter) and, on one occasion, swimming on the surface of a lake and diving, exactly as an auk might do.
Eagle sighting
In complete contrast, we couldn’t garner a solitary sighting of a Solitary Snipe. This is a poorly known Asian species of high mountains above the treeline (to 5000m), which winters not so much in marshes as other snipe species do, but along the margins of rivers, where it eats snails and worms and other fancy items, all of them raw, in classic Japanese fashion.
Despite some hours of searching, admittedly in incredibly attractive streamside locations, we couldn’t find one. Nevertheless, during our search we did discover something else; at a beauty spot we found a dispensing machine that offers hot café latte from a can.
Our hard birding work did, though, eventually pay off in Tochigi. On the last morning our admirably patient and friendly guide, Masayuki Shamada, took
us down to the banks of Lake Chuzenji, acting on a tip-off. After some tense minutes he suddenly exclaimed “Ha!” and pointed. Right over on the other side of the lake, but still looking suitably huge, was a magnificent Steller’s Sea Eagle. It made a desultory attempt at grabbing something from the water surface and then landed imperiously on a treetop, where, with our hearts pounding, we could enjoy seeing this iconic bird through a telescope.
After the hours of snowbound Snipesearching, a short switch to conventional tourism felt surprisingly welcome. The town of Aizuwakamatsu, in Fukushima prefecture, offers a superb glimpse into Japan’s colourful past. It was here, in 1868, that the Boshin War brought 700 years of rule by Shogun (a type of hereditary military dictator) to an end, with the siege of Tsuruga Castle.
The inhabitants of Aizu were among the last to be loyal to the shogunate but were on the wrong side of history; the Emperor Meiji won and was raised to power. Notoriously, during the siege, a small detachment of young Samurai men, no more than teenagers, spotted a fire in Aizu from a nearby hilltop. Wrongly thinking that the castle had fallen, they all attempted to commit ritual suicide; only one of the dozen youngsters survived. There are photos of their young faces in the restored castle’s exhibition.
There are several terrific birding spots around the region of Aizu and nearby Fukushima City. Lake Inawashiro is Japan’s fourth largest and is famous for the changing colour of its surface water. The wetlands, reeds and farmland are excellent for ducks such as Smew, and Bewick’s and Whooper Swans. Longtailed Rosefinches winter round the edge.
On the edge of Fukushima is a terrific small reserve known as Kotori-no-mori (‘Forest of Small Birds’), where the feeders give you point-blank views of Varied Tit, a delectable mix of black, grey and glowing rich chestnut. There were White’s, Pale and Dusky Thrushes here, and lots of Rustic Buntings, and both Long-tailed Rosefinches and Japanese Accentors have been recorded.
Japan’s Lake District lies to the north of Aizu. We stayed in a huge resort near Goshiki-no-mori, on the shores of Lake Hibara, a glorious mixture of coniferous forest and small lakes of all shapes and sizes. We awoke there to find heavy snow had settled. Stumbling through the forest, where signs warned of dangerous Asiatic Black Bears, we managed to see Crossbills flying over, and to pick out some fine Falcated Ducks on one of the lakes, but conditions soon worsened.
After a few hours, the whole scene was a white-out. Dusky Thrushes flew out of every glistening tree, we managed a superb view of the very attractive Japanese Green Woodpecker, and noted that, as we did, the local Bullfinches have conspicuous pink cheeks. But our exploration met a soft, white buffer.
We did have one more treat in store, though. Our brilliant fixer, Yuki Matsuura, had arranged a short visit to the island of Sado, just offshore from Niigata on the coast of the Sea of Japan. This is the scene for the reintroduction of one of the world’s rarest birds, the Asian Crested Ibis, invariably known hereabouts as the Toki. Once considered on the verge of extinction before a previously unknown population in China was discovered, the Toki has been extensively bred in captivity and now is on the road to recovery. Watching this ibis, with its ornate white crest, red face and red legs, with its long, curved bill probing into the ground, I realised how far we had come in a few days. With its backdrop of paddyfields, with deep snow on the ground and the tall, craggy, forested mountains rearing up in the background, the scene really wasn’t like Minsmere at all.