In other seasons there might be 20 of us and only a few of them. But now, in the heart of winter, there are 20 of us and 150 of them. We are Homo sapiens, a gaggle of bird-watchers, scientists, and photographers; they are Grus japonensis, the rare and celebrated red-crowned crane.
The field is white and the wooded edges dark with evergreen. Out in the open in the fine snow of Hokkaido cluster the great white cranes, the black tertial plumes of their broad wings arranged over their rumps like elegant bustles. Known in Japan as tancho (red peak), the red-crowned is the second rarest crane species, after the whooping crane, with a world population of fewer than 2,500 birds. It is in other seasons fiercely territorial, but now the birds are gathered in one clangorous flock to scoop up the winter feed laid down for them by farmers. Some stalk the field or stand in pairs, lifting their bills to trumpet a shrill, rolling cry, a "unison" call that carries across the fields. One flares its wings and arches its back in a dramatic threat display to relieve the tension of crowding. A swoop of six arrives on motionless wing from their roost site in a nearby river, drop lightly to the ground amid the others, and lower their heads to pluck the scattered corn, flashing their brilliant caps of crimson like blood on snow.
The Japanese have a word, aware, for the feelings that arise from the poignant beauty of an ephemeral thing. The word refers not to the fragility or loss of the thing itself, but to the human feelings evoked by its passing. Those of us pressed against the rail are elated and grateful for this close look at the cranes concentrated here like a vision—and which, like a vision, may just as quickly vanish. No wonder people fly halfway around the world, board buses and trains and ferries, and wait patiently in the heavy snow to see these birds gather to preen and flare and dance their wild courtship dances. No wonder the crane is revered by the Japanese and so admired that their art never tires of representing it.
Only in Japan's winter does this spectacle occur, and others as well, a striking assemblage of animals, from cranes and eagles to snow monkeys and sika deer, that endure the season's hard tenancy in small refuges, natural and man-made, on Hokkaido and in the mountains of Japan's main island, Honshu. Some of the animals that take shelter in these spots are abundant, even overabundant; others are rare, having been hunted to the brink of extinction or chivied out of their last natural redoubts by human pressures. Some are in the winter of their existence and endure only through the courageous efforts of a few people working against great odds.
The concentration of these creatures in small shards of habitat on a crowded island nation creates scenes of startling beauty—and sometimes, startling conflict. I've come to Hokkaido to learn what lessons might underlie these spectacles, what they might teach us about wildness and survival and the riddle of our own relations to nature.
To reach Japan, I flew over the top of the Earth, over the white landscapes of the Yukon, Alaska, and the bright, shining Kamchatka Peninsula. From 35,000 feet (11,000 meters) the January landscape was a frozen blank, and I imagined how the razor of winter pushes the wild animals down there to the edge, making extraordinary demands on energy, stripping away all that is ornamental and superfluous. In places with rigorous winters, at high elevations and high latitudes, wild things deal with the food scarcity and cold of the season in two ways: Some retreat from it—either by hibernating, slipping into deep sleep or torpor to reduce the body's metabolic needs, or by migrating, leaving behind the frigid land, often at great energy cost. Others stay put and confront the challenges of a frozen domain, taking a stand within it and discovering its hidden resources, sometimes with astonishing ingenuity.
With peaks over 10,000 feet (3,000 meters), and a long archipelago reaching northward to latitudes of 45°N, parts of Japan experience harsh winters, made more so by chill northwesterly winds that sweep across the Sea of Japan from Siberia, picking up abundant moisture along the way.
Hokkaido, the northernmost of the nation's big islands, is among the snowiest places on Earth. Its wildlife must weather long cold winters and snow that may begin falling in October and melt away only in late spring. From above, the island looks like a great ray, with its mouth to the east in the North Pacific and its tail to the west in the Sea of Japan. Volcanic action here has created a landscape of dramatic mountains and deep crater lakes, and traces of that action—old and new—are everywhere apparent, in old lava, tuff, pumice, and basalt; in steaming fumaroles and bubbling hot springs, which supply refuges of warmth for animals in winter. In her 1880 book, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, British traveler Isabella Bird wrote, Hokkaido "is to the main island of Japan what Tipperary is to an Englishman, Barra to a Scotchman, 'away down in Texas,' to a New Yorker—in the rough, little known, and thinly peopled."
Today Japan still considers Hokkaido its last frontier. The island's history of development is short, beginning only in the mid-1800s with the Meiji Restoration. Before that it was known as Ezo and inhabited by the indigenous Ainu people. With the restoration it received its new name and waves of new settlers, who planted rice fields wherever they could. But compared with Honshu, Hokkaido is still thinly peopled, with a fifth of the nation's land area but only 5 percent of its population. Parts of the island are as developed as any place in Japan, but pieces of it remain open and wild, serving as the winter haunts of some deeply intriguing creatures.
My plan was to travel to some of these wild corners, east from the domain of the red-crowned crane near the city of Kushiro, then along the Pacific coast to the Shiretoko Peninsula, a long, thin finger of wild land that juts into the Sea of Okhotsk, and from there back to the heart of winter crane country. My companions and guides would be Noriyuki Aoki, a young wildlife biologist, and Yulia Satsuki Momose, coordinator of the Tancho Protection Unit—a private foundation for the study of cranes—and one of Hokkaido's powerful voices for the preservation of wild land.
On a day that is fair and free of weathers, Yulia takes me to Kushiro Mire, an impressive sweep of boreal marsh 45,000 acres (18,000 hectares) in area, surrounded by hills and shaped, she says, "like the palm of a great hand." Japan's largest remaining marshland, Kushiro Mire was spared the fate of the nation's other wetlands because of the region's cool, foggy climate, which won't grow rice. It is the heart of the red-crowned crane's breeding grounds and the refuge where nearly all of the island's cranes congregate in winter. This time of year, the yachibozu, fen tussock, and kitayoshi reeds poking up from the snow are all brown, but in late summer their deep emerald green makes a vivid backdrop against which the tancho looks whiter than snow.
"Before the restoration, these birds were found in abundance in Honshu and Hokkaido," Yulia says. "Some of the cranes here in Hokkaido may once have migrated to warmer places in Honshu to overwinter. But hunting and the disappearance of their habitat forced all the cranes out of Honshu."
By the turn of the past century, even the cranes in Hokkaido were thought to have been lost to extinction. Somehow, a handful of the birds clung to a fragile existence deep in Kushiro Mire, roosting and feeding in the icy waters of small rivers. In 1924 they were discovered, and part of the marsh was designated a protected area. But three decades later the population still hovered at only 33 birds. Then, in the winter of 1952, Hokkaido suffered a bout of severe cold and blizzards. Local farmers found the cranes nearly starved and began to feed them corn and buckwheat. Every winter thereafter, they fed them, first at farms scattered around the countryside and more recently at four established feeding stations and several satellite feeding stations throughout eastern Hokkaido. As a result of the winter feeding, the number of Japanese cranes has risen to nearly 900.
Yulia came to Hokkaido more than 40 years ago when her late father, Shoichiro Satsuki, who had grown up on the island, returned to practice medicine in his native landscape. "He came back because he loved the land here," Yulia says, "and he threw his support to scientific studies of the ecology of eastern Hokkaido, especially of the crane and its habitat." When the family arrived, the eastern region of the island was mostly broad, reedy swampland. Over the past half century, however, Kushiro Mire has been radically reduced. "If you fly over the area, which I've done many times," Yulia tells me, "you see how little is left." Though part of the marsh was made a national park in 1987, it remains under threat from roadbuilding, the channeling of rivers, expanding farmlands, and a hundred other troubles.
As we travel east, away from the great marsh, the sun glances off snowy farm fields and remnant pockets of marshland. A rough-legged hawk hovers over a stand of reeds and sedges, white-tailed sea-eagles perch on the telephone poles, and everywhere circle scavenging black kites. Yulia points out the site of a new crane nest she found three years ago, tucked into a patch of vestigial marsh by the road. "We were so excited—there are not many new nests built. But so far this one has not been successful."
The land here marked the father; it has marked the daughter as well. Trained in the United States as an immunohematologist, Yulia has given over her professional life to the red-crowned crane. She and her husband, Kunikazu Momose, an ornithologist at the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology and an authority on Grus japonensis, study the bird year-round with the assistance of Hiroyuki Masatomi of Senshu University, taking censuses of its winter populations, conducting aerial surveys of its breeding grounds, banding individuals to learn about their movements and life cycle.
What they have learned is sobering. While the crane population in Japan is slowly increasing, at an average rate of about 5 to 7 percent each year, its habitat is rapidly shrinking, which will ultimately limit its numbers. Some 90 pairs of cranes now nest in Kushiro Mire—"probably more than the marsh can handle," says Yulia. With the decrease in the marsh area, the density of breeding has increased, explains Masatomi, who has studied the crane and its behavior for almost 40 years and is considered its foremost expert. "Ten years ago, there were two nests in each ten-square-kilometer area; now there are four or five. Because the birds are territorial, this crowding can reduce the number of surviving chicks. While the adults fight to defend their territory, the chicks are left vulnerable to predators—foxes, eagles, crows."
A few crane pairs that winter in Hokkaido have begun breeding in the nearby Kuril Islands. There is other good breeding habitat just to the north of Hokkaido in the wild, open marshes of Sakhalin Island. Several years ago Yulia suggested to Japan's Ministry of the Environment that it explore the possibility of transferring pairs of cranes there to expand their range. "It's unnatural, and risky, to have the whole population of cranes concentrated in the Kushiro area," Yulia says. "Bringing the birds together at feeding stations increases the risk of catastrophic mortality if disease were to strike. These birds can survive on their own, even in winter—if they have good habitat." But Yulia's idea never came to pass, in part because of tense relations between Japan and Russia, which have yet to resolve their decades-old dispute over ownership of the Kuril Islands.
For more than a thousand years the Japanese have written the tancho into poems and folktales and myths. They have painted it and made statues and sculptures of it. They have revered it as a symbol of long life, happiness, good luck, fidelity. From its life habits they have drawn phrases and metaphors to describe their own behavior. They have imitated it and tried to dance as it dances. They have caught and killed and eaten it, almost to the point of extinction. They have named cities and streets after it. They have folded it into tiny birds of paper and hung them carefully in colored festoons at temples and shrines and on the stone monuments to Hiroshima in Peace Memorial Park. They have made it a national treasure. They have captured, marked and released it, tracked it and spied on its habits and behavior. They have fed it. They have tried to raise it in captivity for release and failed. Most of all, they have made it into an icon and put its image everywhere, so that this extremely rare bird is, ironically, seen throughout Japan—on teacups and trays and fans, on lampposts and bridges, on wedding cards, kimonos, and cakes, on the backs of thousand-yen notes and the tail fins of jets.
The story of the red-crowned crane in Japan is emblematic of other animals. Though the nation's knowledge of nature and its reverence for animals are ancient, its efforts to protect wildlife are relatively young. Since the early 20th century Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs has designated certain plants and animals as "natural monuments," cultural assets of the people. The designation protects various species under special laws, which prohibit their destruction except when they infringe on human enterprise. Today there are close to 200 species that rank as monuments, from the red-crowned crane to the goatlike serow.
But monument status does little to protect an animal's rich biological context. Nor does it guarantee any government commitment to the study of its ecology. Often completely overlooked is the fate of the animal's habitat, the old-growth forest or sedge-and-reed wetland that harbors thousands of other species that may be critical to its well-being.
The first of Japan's national parks were created in 1934 not for the benefit of wildlife but for physical fitness and other recreational activities. These days the 28 national parks and 55 so-called quasi-national parks fall under the umbrella of the Ministry of the Environment, whose mission is to secure "the coexistence of people and nature." But "the primary purpose of the parks is still to draw people and to create a source of revenue for the area," says Masaaki Kohmaru, who served with the government's environment agency for 25 years. Some of the national park land is privately owned and, according to the official literature of the ministry, management of the parks "requires consideration of people's property rights and various industrial activities in the areas concerned." At Kushiro Mire, says Yulia, "you can still get permission to drain and develop, depending on who you know."
"We are a tiny land," explains Kohmaru. "Unlike America, we don't have any place where no one lives, so we have to make compromises."
Recently, the government has made efforts to protect habitat devoted to a few species, including the red-crowned crane and Blakiston's fish-owl. Also known as Blakiston's eagle-owl, or shima-fukuro, it is arguably the largest of the world's owls and one of its most endangered. But Yulia fears that it may be too late for some species, including the fish-owl. "There are not many of these birds left," Yulia tells me, as we head toward the owl's haunts at the eastern edge of the island. "And you'll see why. Most live in an area once called Nimuoro, an old Ainu word meaning 'the place of many trees.'"
Just after sunset on the bank of a small river near the city of Nemuro, we are waiting for the appearance of shima-fukuro at a feeding station, a small raised wooden platform set on a pole not far from the river. With us is the world's expert on the fish-owl, Sumio Yamamoto, who has brought fish for the owls' evening feeding and put it on the platform. A tall, wry man in his 50s, Yamamoto has studied the fish-owl for 30 years. There was a time when the bird was found all over Hokkaido, he explains, as far west as Sapporo. But changes in the 19th and 20th centuries—the cutting of old-growth trees, which are the nesting sites for these owls, and the construction of dams and channeling of rivers, which eliminated most native fish runs—have reduced its numbers in Japan to only 130 birds.
The sky darkens, and the fish sits. I don't know how long we wait in the dark, talking in low voices and blowing on our hands for warmth. A quarter moon rises, just enough to set the snow glowing. We stop our chatter and listen. A few minutes later we hear a deep sonorous bo-bohhh, the call of a male fish-owl, then the female's plaintive one-note answer, bohhh. Then again, bo-bohhh. Bohhh. So tightly timed is the duet that it sounds like one bird delivering a three-note call.
To the Ainu people the fish-owl was a god of many names. It was Kunneriki, "the god crying at night"; Kotan Kuru Kamui, "the god who protects villages"; and Moshiri Kuru Kamui, "the god who protects the country." The owl's English name comes from Thomas Wright Blakiston, a British soldier, businessman, and amateur naturalist who lived in Hokkaido in the second half of the 19th century. Ironically, Blakiston may have had a hand in undoing the owl's woodlands. In 1861 Blakiston traveled to Siberia with equipment for lumbering, intent on harvesting the abundant trees on the Siberian coast of the Sea of Okhotsk—only to find that the Russian government would not grant him permission to cut. So he went on to harvest the rich forests of Hokkaido, first in Hakodate, and, when timber grew scarce, in the island's eastern reaches.
To replace nesting sites lost in the demise of old-growth trees, the Japanese government has provided more than a hundred nesting boxes. Yamamoto and his colleagues have built several feeding stations to help the owls overwinter. So far, several owl pairs have taken to these man-made solutions to man-made problems. But scarcity of habitat remains the chief factor limiting the population's growth. "These birds are territorial," Yamamoto explains. "When a chick grows up, it needs to find its own nesting territory. It does so by flying perch to perch for short distances. Around here, there's no habitat left that is not occupied by other owls, and there are few trees connecting one wooded area to another."
Farther north, on Shiretoko, there are larger forest areas well suited to the fish-owls. Yamamoto has been planting trees along riverbanks to create corridors of green all the way to Shiretoko—"a big dream on a small scale," he says, which will take 50 or 100 years to complete.
The next morning low clouds scud across a gray sky. Yamamoto leads us into a protected area set aside for the owl, a small stand of second-growth trees not far from Nemuro. The quiet is broken by the hoarse calls of jungle crows and the crunch of our boots along the snowy trail winding among the young Japanese oaks and elms, the occasional slender birch, ash, and alder. I wonder what this world must once have looked like, giant old-growth spruces and firs a hundred feet high and several feet thick. But there, in a spindly elm, Yamamoto spots an owl chick, memorable by itself for the intensity of its wild gold eye; then in another tree, another chick. Then the female, mother of the chicks, flies across our line of vision; and there, not far from her, perched on a thin limb of a young oak tree, is her mate, a magnificent creature, his great ear tufts alert to the impertinent crow hovering and croaking above his limb.
Four shima-fukuro in one morning—3 percent of Japan's population. I am moved, and Yulia is too. For all her wanderings in the woods and marshes of Hokkaido, she has never seen a family of fish-owls in the wild. This, too, is a spectacle of its own kind, less like the raucous, ebullient epic of the flocking cranes and more like haiku.
That afternoon we travel north in the snow to see Shiretoko, one of Japan's last real wilderness areas, and witness some of the mixed effects of wildlife protection efforts. Shiretoko is an Ainu word meaning "the end of the Earth," and the area is well named, with high mountains blanketed by oldgrowth forest, clear rivers and lakes, and a sheer, dramatic coastline of black volcanic rock and steep waterfalls, carved away by the grinding action of the ice floes that drift down from the north in winter. The northern part of the peninsula is designated as national park and serves as a refuge for some of the country's rarest creatures—fish-owls, Steller's sea-eagles, brown bears, Steller sea lions—and also, for some of its most abundant animals, including the sika deer.
Along the steep slopes at the base of the peninsula, herds of the deer are grazing on the sparse vegetation emerging from the snow. The sika is a forest deer with large moist eyes and a strange, haunting whistle. In the past 20 years the population has exploded. Great herds graze and forage nearly everywhere in eastern Hokkaido, defoliating trees and damaging crops. After 1888 hunting of the sika was banned. With no natural predators to keep it in check, the population surged so dramatically—numbering more than a hundred thousand in eastern Hokkaido alone—that it came to be viewed as a pest, and hunting was again permitted to cull the population. Similar protective measures have also backfired with natural treasures such as the Japanese macaque and the serow.
Japan is not alone in its paradoxical dilemma with deer and other wildlife. I think of Australia and its kangaroos and rabbits, the United States and its white-tailed deer. We want to turn our wild animal populations on and off like a faucet, to control the numbers so that a given species will maintain a population sizable enough to sustain itself, but small enough so as not to become a nuisance in our backyards and orchards. But nature is never so cooperative, and our efforts to boost or reduce numbers often produce undesired results. So too our stumbling efforts at compromise, at balancing our needs with those of an animal. How does a crane's need for open wetland and solitude figure against the human desire for rice field or pasture? In nurturing or cherishing wild animals, how close can we come and still call them wild? And if an animal requires solitude and pristine habitat, can we deny ourselves the pleasure of seeing it?
From Shiretoko, our plan is to circle back to the heart of winter crane country. But first we travel through the subarctic landscape of Akan National Park in search of another big spectacle of a bird. On a cold morning before sunrise we arrive at the shore of Kussharo Lake. Before us is a dark lake of sleeping whooper swans. Kussharo is the largest calderic lake in Japan, ringed with blue volcanic hills and filled with clear water like a lake of melted snow. Because it is fed by hot springs, some parts remain unfrozen all winter so there is open water where the swans can roost at night. We have missed the great flocks of thousands of whoopers that gather in eastern Hokkaido in November and December on their way from Siberia to warmer regions on Honshu. But there are hundreds still here overwintering on the island.
In the rising light the pale forms take shape, heads tucked beneath wings, in perfect stillness. Across the water dawn breaks in the throat of a single swan, and the necks of the birds before us unfurl and pop free of their wings. One by one, they warm their bodies from sleep, swim a little, then rise into clamorous flight. They leave for their feeding grounds at nearby Sunayu; we do too—and arrive just in time. A tourist bus has pulled in, along with hundreds of swans, who are squawking and scrabbling for the food flung down by the crowds of tourists, bits of bread and chips, "things not part of their natural diet," Yulia comments, "and not healthy."
"Are these birds wild?" she asks, then answers herself: "I don't think so." Indeed, so popular are these swan-feeding sites, and so heavily used by whoopers and tourists alike, that the swans have grown tame, accepting food from the palm of a hand, and the whooper that feeds itself in winter in Hokkaido has become a rare bird indeed. "This is good for tourism," observes Yulia. "It is not good for the swans."
I would hear this message again in the Hida mountains of Honshu, where a rare and demure little bird, the antithesis of the raucous whooper, ekes out an unlikely winter existence. I never saw a rock ptarmigan in the wild; nor did I expect to. The bird lives in a fragile alpine environment of dwarf pine forest at an elevation of 7,800 feet (2,400 meters). There its population hovers precariously around 2,000; five out of six chicks in every brood are lost to cold and predators. So remote and snowy is the ptarmigan's winter habitat, with snowfall averaging 20 feet (6 meters) or more a year and slopes subject to avalanches, that the scientists who study the bird must be skilled mountain climbers. One of these is Takaaki Sakanakura, an athletic ornithologist with the Evolutionary Biology Institute, who has been monitoring the population, nesting sites, and winter ecology of the species for the past two decades. In winter the ptarmigan migrates to the steepest parts of the slopes to feed on the tops of a few exposed plants sticking up from the snow. Come spring, the males gather on small pine mounds, chests puffed out, to stake out their territories with displays and an odd froglike call.
For eons the bird carried out its strange ritual in solitude in a pristine environment, but around 30 years ago, the Japanese government approved a tourist route through the ptarmigan's habitat, a combination bus–cable-car–hiking trail that "you can navigate in high heels," says Sakanakura. Each year a million tourists do just that, to enjoy the mountain views and hike among the wildflowers. They often bring their pets and leave their dirt and waste, which carry disease and draw the ptarmigan's predators—civets, ermines, crows.
"The impact of these tourists is grave," says Shoichi Kawano of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. "Our only hope in preserving the ptarmigan lies in protecting it from human destruction by limiting the access of tourists." But so far the Japanese government has shown little interest in restricting human activity in the region.
The only ptarmigan I saw was a caged bird that had suffered injury and could not live on its own. It was a singular beauty, snow-white with a bright black eye, a messenger from another time and place, like starlight. Standing before the captive bird, I was reminded of those Japanese paintings that use a small, delicate compressed part of nature to evoke the vastness of nature's whole—the spray of flower to suggest the field, or the single wave to call up the great ocean. Most of us will never see the spectacle of a wild ptarmigan, white against white in the lash of wind on high slope. But I suspect most of us would like to know it's there, and always will be—a bird-shaped realization of winter resilience.
The morning after the swans, we are back in crane country for one last visit, searching for a pair of cranes that are feeding themselves in a natural setting, without human assistance. Locals have reported spotting the pair somewhere in the flat pastureland near Kushiro. The report is important because it suggests that the tancho may be extending their range, not just for wintering but for breeding. "These birds have so much to teach us," Yulia tells me. "We need to know how they select and establish their territories, what they need in order to survive there. This is critical if we're going to help them expand their range."
We stop at a small shop to ask a local man whether he has seen the self-sufficient cranes, and then again, at a school. No one can report any sign of the pair. Later we see a small group of cranes—likely visitors to a nearby feeding station, Yulia says. The birds are still roosting in the water, hunched against the cold. Relative to the air, the water is tepid, and the cranes sleep standing up in the streams, not just for warmth but for protection from predators. Each bird has its own rhythm of sleeping and waking once an hour through the night. While there is no designated "guard" bird, the group's collective chaotic sleep cycle improves the chances that one bird or another will wake in time to see a lurking predator and send up a cry.
The birds are quiet now, but I think back to the first time I heard their call. Borne through a long, coiled trachea, the call resonates like the tube in a wind instrument and can be heard for up to two miles (3.2 kilometers). The resulting sound gave rise to the Japanese expression, tsuru no hitokoe, "a call of the crane," meaning a voice of authority.
Japan will not dismantle its cities or farms in favor of deer or birds. It is too late to set aside large reserves. What it can do is save and protect what remains, seek ways for marshland and farmland to coexist, support efforts to understand the ecology of its species. Japanese conservationists are working as if their country will do the right thing. I find their optimism, and their devotion to understanding natures other than our own, nearly as inspiring as the crane's resounding cry.
The white peaks and steaming hot springs are the drama of this country, but its mysteries are its wild creatures persisting against the slim margin of winter. The red-crowned crane passes the frigid night standing one-legged in the icy stream beside a fellow crane; the ptarmigan finds food through cold, labored downslope searching. We have seen these simple mysteries of grace and survival; think of all the secrets not yet revealed.