Japan's Cranes, Herons & Waterbirds

About this book

The only English guide built entirely from meetings with Japan's cranes, herons and waterbirds — 200 encounters instead of 200 species accounts and instead of 200 place profiles: the goose flight leaving Izunuma in the dark, ten thousand cranes counted one by one at Izumi, spoonbills sweeping the Ariake flat at low tide, a booming bittern met by ear alone, and storks watched on the terms of the town that brought them back.

Every entry is built in the same four movements — the birds 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 or a site profile: the meeting itself is the subject, its flock behaviour, its ground and watching terms, its season window and its craft. Exact roost and colony locations are never given more precisely than the official sources give them; protected status, access, feeding programmes, event dates, site rules and tide 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 waterbird year · cranes of Hokkaido and Izumi · geese and swans of the northern lakes · herons, egrets and the still hunters · ducks, grebes and the winter rafts · spoonbills, storks and ibis · tidal flats, rivers and city sanctuaries · and the watcher's craft — flock reading, the great counts, sanctuary institutions, feeding-ground etiquette and a waterbird year of one's own.