Cranes, Eagles and Drift Ice.

The programme.

1. Day 1Kushiro

   In by air from Tokyo. Gear check and a briefing that is mostly about cold: batteries, condensation when a lens comes indoors, and what minus fifteen before dawn actually does to hands. Early night — the first session is before first light.

2. Days 2–3Kushiro wetlands

   Red-crowned cranes. The feeding grounds mid-morning for the display, and the river roost at dawn where the birds stand in the water and the mist rises off it — the shot everyone comes for, and the one that needs a still, hard-frozen morning. Two attempts are built in because one is a coin toss.

3. Days 4–5Lake Kussharo and Nemuro

   Across by road with a winter-equipped vehicle and a driver who works this country in February. Whooper swans on the thermal margins of a frozen lake, Blakiston's fish owl at a hide in the evening — a strictly limited, silent, no-flash proposition and never a guaranteed sighting.

4. Days 6–7Rausu

   Steller's sea eagles and white-tailed eagles from a small boat into the Nemuro strait before sunrise. The boats sail on the drift ice, and the ice arrives from the north on the wind — some Februaries it packs the coast, some it barely comes, and in a bad year sailings are cancelled for days. Two mornings are held; a land alternative along the coast is written into the file, not invented on the day.

5. Day 8Kushiro or Memanbetsu

   Out by air to Tokyo. Departures from this coast are few and delay on snow, so the file never puts an international connection on the same day.

When to ask.

Nine to twelve months. The lodgings near the crane sites and at Rausu are small, seasonal and taken almost entirely by photography groups who rebook the same February the year before. Hide permits and boat seats are capped by law and by hull. A party asking in November for that February is asking for the third-best of everything.

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