Big Birding in Japan — Drew Hamilton

A juvenile Stellar’s sea-eagle soars along the Hokkaido coastline.

Big Birding in Japan (round 1)

True confession: I’m not a birder. I don’t have the eyes for it. I like my birds big and easy to see. Wonderful times have been had looking for little songbirds and humming birds but there is a certain thrill in seeing birds with wingspans wider than I am tall. They have a primal nature and project dinosaur-energy rather than sweet songs for the morning.

Hokkaido in the winter provides opportunities for some VERY BIG birding. Images of red-crowned cranes dancing in fields of snow and stellar’s sea eagles fighting on ice dominated google searches done in preparation. This was a scouting trip. Never having been there before much time was spent on instagram and the internet trying to picture what we would encounter.

My friend, Justin Gibson (traveller extrodinare) , put this together to find spots and figure out the tricks and photographic subjects available in the winter specifically. Trip details here. Plus I had recently purchased the Olympus EM1-X and was interested to take it out for a spin on something besides bears. Justin was one of the people who turned me on to the Micro 4/3 system back when we worked together in Churchill, MB so I knew we would be swapping pointers.

I went back and forth on what lenses to bring and think I ended up bringing pretty much all of them. For the birds my go to lens would be the 300mm f/4 but I also brought a 40-150 f/2.8. For non-widlife photos I brought a 7-14mm f/2.8, 12-40mm f/2.8, and a 25mm f/.95 that I had really enjoyed using in Uzbekistan. I was planning on doing some street photography in Tokyo and figured my wildlife setup wouldn’t be ideal (more on that later).

Three of us arrived in Tokyo a couple days early to try and make some timezone adjustments before meeting up with the rest of our posse in Sapporo. After renting a sweet adventure mini-van we started to head north. The goal was to get to the far north end of the island to find the sea eagles as fast as possible. However, the weather had other plans. After much driving through blizzards and subsisting on 7-11 sushi we rolled in late to the town of Shari.

The next morning dawned dark, snowy, cold, and impressively windy. Photographer instincts told us to move on. After some messaging with Japanese friends we decided to head to the town of Rausu where we checked into the one and only hotel that would take us. The weather was breaking and we were anxious to get out and look for eagles. When we asked the woman checking us in where to find the eagles she looked at us like we were daft and said “UP!”

Beauty everywhere as the storm broke. iPhone 11pro, live mode (long exposure)

A little confused but unphased we set out and sure enough we spotted our first sea-eagle flying low through the boat harbor. As we got further out the road the weather turned beautiful and we broke trail in our adventure van as townspeople started to emerge to dig out from the blizzard.

A group of sea-eagles is called a constellation. Olympus EM-1X, 300mm f/4, 500 iso, 1/1000 sec.

With me driving and 4 spotters in the car it wasn’t long before we spotted eagles EVERYWHERE. At one point we counted 24 stellar’s sea eagles and white tailed eagles enjoying the freedom missed during the big storm.

White tailed eagles were mixed in with the stellar’s. Olympus EM-1X, 300mm f/4, 320 iso, 1/250 sec.

Seeing these eagles was like nothing else I had experienced while birding. Huge, soaring, creatures conjuring childhood visions of pterodactyls just might have made a birder out of me yet.