Japan's Owls, Hawks & Eagles

About this book

The only English guide built entirely from meetings with Japan's birds of prey — 200 encounters instead of 200 species accounts: sea eagles quartering the drift ice at dawn, ten thousand buzzard-eagles pouring out of a kettle over a strait cape, a hobby striking swallows out of the harbour lamps' light, harriers folding out of an empty dusk into one acre of reeds, and a fish owl's river watched at the distance the bird itself has set.

Every entry is built in the same four movements — the bird and the encounter, how the meeting works, where and when to watch, and the care and the official check — and no entry is a species account: the meeting itself is the subject, its weather system, its economy, its watch point and its season. Exact nest, eyrie and roost locations are never given more precisely than the official sources give them; protected status, access, event dates and ice and ferry conditions are never asserted as fixed facts — every entry closes with its own official source to confirm, while the durable part — the encounter, the mechanism, the ground, the craft — is given in full.

Eight parts: the raptor year · eagles of ice and coast · hawks on the river of air · falcons at the edge · kites, harriers and the low hunters · owls on the night shift · the island and southern raptors of the great arc from Sata to Yonaguni · and the watcher's craft — the great counting grounds as institutions, flight identification, the counter's notebook, the nest rule and the roost rule, and a raptor year of your own.