The beating of thousands of wings set bird-watching hearts aflutter


A wintering ground for wild geese and swans, Lake Izu-numa is a paradice for birders--and anglers--willing to get up before dawn.
By AKIO OGAWA
Asahi Evening News
Januari 6, 1997

As with so many things in life, anything can go wrong when it comes to bird-watching.
A blizzard raged for four days when I flew to Hokkaido five years ago to admire the cranes dancing in the Kushiro Wetlands. The only cranes I saw were painted on road signs far away from the area.
Taking a shinkansen train and a taxi, I rushed to Lake Biwa three years ago when I heard a rare species of wild goose had landed there. All I could see even with my powerful telescope was a single tiny dot bobbing on the choppy waters.
I had always wanted to visit Lake Izu-numa and Lake Uchi-numa, its sister lake, in northern Miyagi Prefecture near the Iwate border. Among bird-watchers around the country, the lakes are famous for whooper swans (with 250-centimeter wing spans) and white-fronted geese (200-centimeter wing spans) coming from Siberia for the winter.
For any birder, these lakes are thought to gather the largest concentration of wintering water fowl in the country, making them a sort of mecca to be visited at least once in lifetime.
Swans are quite photogenic, but the sheer number of white-fronted geese on the lakes in the winter--80 percent of all the kinds of geese wintering in Japan--is the bigger attraction.
Especially, watching the birds lift off in a massive simultaneous drive at daybreak is the dream of every birder. All the geese on the two lakes fly off at sunrise and go to feed in harvested paddy fields as far as 20 kilometers away. They do not return to the lakes before sundown.
A few weeks ago, a fellow birder in the area called to say, "We are having 40,000 white-fronted geese this year, an all-time record, up from 25,000 a winter ago. Don't miss this chance!" She persuaded me that the time had come to watch the legendary lift-off.
This time around, I took all precautions imaginable. I called the local weathermen several times before fixing my expedition date.

Best observation spot

Once there, I visited all the three observatories by taxi, two near the 450-hectare Lake Izu-numa and the other around the 48-hectare Lake Uchi-numa, to decide the best possible observation point. The rangers agreed that the blue-painted water gate on the northern shore on Lake Izu-numa is the best place to observe the birds at this time of the season. Lake Izu-numa is big, 16 kilometers in circumference.
The rangers also told me the 40,000 white-fronted geese arrived on the western shore of Lake Izu-numa in late October from Siberia and had broken up into several flocks. The largest group, 10,000 strong, had been seen off the blue water gate the previous week.
After dinner of sashimi, tempura and delicious rice, I donned all my warmest clothing and left the Motoyoshi Inn in Nitta, a birders' nest near the lakes in the township of Hazama, just in front of Nitta Station on JR Tohoku trunk line.
The small town was quiet and dark, with only a restaurant and a tiny convenience store open along the main street. The sky was bright with stars. Cars zoomed by from time to time.
Guided by a lamp strapped to my head, I trekked three kilometers to reach a junction on the north shore of Lake Izu-numa. I checked my area map to be sure there was only one road along the north shore.
I had already decided to walk the seven kilometers to the blue water gate the next morning. A taxi driver might oversleep. And above all, I didn't want the sound of the taxi to disturb the birds sleeping on the water.
When I returned to the inn, I had a long chat with Masayoshi Chiba, the inn's owner and chairman of the Swans and Geese Preservation Association in the town.
Sitting by a kotatsu foot warmer, Chiba said, "We have been engaged in a heated guessing game as to why we are having so many geese this winter. The emerging consensus is that a record number of chicks survived because the weather was so good in Siberia this past summer."
He also told me the three townships that surround the lakes--Hazama, Wakayanagi and Tsukidate--had fought a bitter battle over control of the lake water that has irrigated the rice paddies of the towns for centuries. The three towns buried the hatchet in 1985 when the lakes were registered under the Ramsar Convention, designed to protect the wetlands of the world and help birds migrate with ease.

Alarm watch

My alarm went off precisely at 4:30 a.m. the next morning. Thanks to my scouting the previous night, I had no trouble reaching the junction.
It was still dark with few stars and no moon in the sky. I switched off my head lamp and began tip-toeing onto the road around the northern shore of the lake.
Feeling my way along the asphalt road, I heard whooper swans shriek high-pitched warnings close to the bank. Some ducks surprised me with quacks of alarm just below the bank. My adrenalin started pumping when I heard white-fronted geese honk in distance.
By the time I reached the blue water gate, a faint hint of pink had crept into the dark sky to the east.
With awe, I saw that the lake in front of me was covered with a mammoth carpet of tens of thousands of birds amid withered lotus leaves.
Both birds and leaves were in dark silhouette against the almost black surface of the water.
It was calm, with almost no wind. But it was still cold. I stamped my feet quietly.
I was alone where I stood. It looked like there were a few other bird-watchers on the other side of the lake closer to the town.
The eastern horizon turned pink as the sun prepared to rise. Now I could see red and blue rooftops on the other side of the lake. Smoke curled upward on the western shore. It looked like farmers were up early, burning straw.
Suddenly, a huge and burning red fireball, popped up over the eastern horizon and rose quickly, soon hidden behind clouds.
Through my pair of binoculars, now I could clearly see the thick belt of brown white-fronted geese, seven to 10 abreast. When the wind picked up a little, the slightly undulating belt stretched for about 700 meters from east to west.
Honk, honk, honk. It grew in intensity, with each goose joining in a great morning chorus. A couple of geese rose up as if on a scouting mission.
Then, after a high-pitched honk or two, every goose went silent.
The next moment came the lift-off.
Thousands of wings struck the surface of the water with great force all at once, and I heard a big bang echo over the lake.
As a single creature, the long belt of geese lifted off in one piece as if pulled up simultaneously from heaven. The birds picked up speed and rose straight up, and the belt broke apart into thousands of individual geese. Now the birds covered the sky and seemed to be flying in all directions. But the next moment, they swooped over me in wide formations just like jets flying an acrobatic demonstration. The roar was incredible.
The show was over in a matter of seconds. By the time I clicked the shutter a seventh time, they were over the hills and gone to the north. I felt dizzy. Slowly all kinds of ducks that had slept among the withered lotus leaves began to move. The ducks and lotus leaves were clearly distinguishable now. Most of ducks turned out to be pintails with black tails trailing out behind them. There were also mallards and shovelers. Occasionally, whooper swans flew in formations of two or three with their long necks stretching ahead of them.
On the way back to the town to have breakfast, I heard an outboard engine near the junction. A blue-painted vessel made its way gingerly through rows of similar blue boats.
The early fishermen, Katsuyoshi Oikawa, 65, and his wife Haruko, 62, got off their boat and began wrapping two big carp in newspaper. Katsuyoshi, who operates a nearby irrigation pumping station, said, "We are selling them to a restaurant."
I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the Izu-numa remains a productive lake. He said 82 out of the 238-member local fishermen's cooperative still actively net fish ranging from carp, eels, catfish to funa, a favorite Japanese game fish that looks like flattened dark carp.

Large-scale reclamation

He caught me off guard when he declared that there never used to be a Lake Izu-numa. "When I was a kid, this place was called Onuma (big lake) and it was three times bigger than it is now."
Land reclamation began during World War II and continued well into the post-war years to help feed the starving population. "In retrospect, we have lost a huge chunk of water filled with fish for nothing. Most of the paddies are no longer cultivated," he said.
When I crossed a bridge over the Arakawa River that flows out of the lake, I was in for another pleasant surprise. It looked like all the locals were out, lining the 20-meter-wide river from both sides and fishing for funa. There were at least 500 of them--quite a spectacle.
In the afternoon, I went to the Sanctuary Center on the northern shore to have a final view of the big lake. Shaped like a swan, the center is equipped with more than two dozen telescopes on the second floor. The floor-to-ceiling glass observatory lets visitors see the whole vista of Lake Izu-numa.
Just below the center is a feeding station for swans.
Toru Shibazaki, director of research, said, "Ideally, we should not do any feeding. We plant water oats as much as possible in summer, but it's still not enough yet." I recalled reading in a birding magazine about some towns and cities in other parts of Miyagi Prefecture that have begun feeding swans as a tourist attraction. In fact, the number of swans at Lake Izu-numa was down 2,000 from the 4,000 a few years ago.
"We are not worried," said Shibazaki. "When we can plant enough water oats, they will come back. The environment is the best here."
While I was waiting for a taxi, Shigenori Kikuchi, the 30-year-old manager of the center, chatted with me.
"Come back in summer when the pink lotus flowers cover every inch of the surface of the lake. It is No. 1 at least in Japan," he said. He stopped short of saying, "No.1 in the world."
He added, "Also come back again in late October when you can see 40,000 white-fronted geese lift off simultaneously. The sky goes dark, covered with so many birds. No wide-angle lens can even capture it. You have to see it with your own eyes."
As many as 30,000 visitors flocked to the center last year, with two-thirds of them coming in winter.
When I got out of the taxi at the station, I looked around for the statue of Takashi Hase-gawa, the late Liberal Democratic Party heavyweight from Miyagi Prefecture.
It turned out to be a modest affair, just a life-size bronze of his head, in the middle of the plaza in front of Kurikoma Kogen Station on the Tohoku shinkansen line.
It was modest repayment for the service he did for his constituency: he managed to put a station here in the middle of vast paddy fields against all reason. The next station along, Furukawa, is only a few minutes away.
He grinned behind his glasses and I grinned back. I boarded the train and transferred to a non-stop train at Sendai. I arrived at Tokyo Station three hours after leaving the Sanctuary Center.
Note: One thing Ogawa-san might have been left out: the inevitable bombardment with bird droppings while he was standing on the dyke...