Japan for Birdwatchers & Wildlife Travelers

About this book

Japan may be the best bird country on earth that the world has not yet planned a trip around — cranes dancing on snow fields, sea eagles crowding the drift ice of Shiretoko, ten thousand geese lifting off a farm lake at dawn, a flightless rail walking the edge of a subtropical forest. The species have their field guides. What has been missing is the journey itself.

Japan for Birdwatchers & Wildlife Travelers is the complete guide to 200 birding journeys, habitats and seasons: how a bird trip in Japan is timed, based, equipped and walked with restraint; the crane marshes and eagle coasts of Hokkaido and Tohoku; the capital's flats, sacred marshes and high Alps; the great lake, the calm Inland Sea and the strait crossings of the west; the crane plains, spoonbill seas and subtropical islands of the south; seabird colonies and the great migration circuits; and the birding year, month by month, with its themed pilgrimages — owls, kingfishers, raptors, seabirds, warblers, herons, ducks and the endemics found nowhere else on earth. Every journey follows one format — the route, the birds and their habitat, the season and its fieldcraft, and access, ethics and the official check — and changeable details are never frozen into print: each entry points you to the official source for its ground.