On a winter morning near Tsurui, the field shows almost no colour: snow, reed, low cloud, a black line of trees. Then a red-crowned crane steps out of the white like a single brushstroke, black neck, white body, a cap of bare red skin, setting each foot down slowly on the snow. Another answers from beyond the reeds with a call closer to a trumpet than a song, and it carries flat across the frozen ground.
Japan nearly lost this bird. The cranes that winter around Kushiro today, on marsh, farmland and river, descend from a few dozen survivors counted in the middle of the last century.
the bird
The bird built for winter
Tancho, the Japanese name for the red-crowned crane, means simply red crown. The red is bare skin rather than feather, and it brightens when the bird is roused. An adult stands about a metre and a half tall, opens a wingspan of up to two and a half metres, and is among the heaviest of the world's fifteen crane species. What looks like a black tail on a standing bird is in fact a fold of long black wing feathers drooping over a tail that is white.
Male and female differ in one small detail. The male's cheek, throat and neck are a deep black; the female's are a softer, pearly grey. Otherwise they match in height and pattern, so that a pair at a distance moves like one bird and its reflection.
Japan's cranes, gathered almost entirely in the marsh, farmland and river country of eastern Hokkaidō, do not migrate. Their continental relatives breed along the Amur river system on the border of Russia and China and fly south for the winter, to the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas and the coastal wetlands of Yancheng in China. The Hokkaidō birds nest in the wetland through the warmer months and stay on the same ground through the cold, feeding at open water and on farmland once snow has closed the rest of the marsh.
Their summer ground is Kushiro Shitsugen, the largest wetland in Japan, which in 1980 became the country's first site under the Ramsar Convention and in 1987 a national park. Through the warm months the cranes feed there on fish, frogs, insects and water plants, wading the slow channels of the Kushiro River among reed and sedge. A pair nests in the reeds in spring, on a mound of dead stems over shallow water. Two eggs are usual, incubated by both parents for about a month, and the chicks take their first flight at around ninety-five days old, well before the marsh turns white again. The crane standing in the January snow is in the place where it was born.
the dance
The dance and the unison call
The dance that made Kushiro's cranes famous is courtship. Paired birds bow, leap, toss snow or grass into the air and open their wings fully, calling as they move. Red-crowned cranes pair for years, many of them for life, and an established pair dances through the winter as readily as a young one still choosing.
The call carries much further than the size of the bird suggests. Male and female sing different notes that interlock into a single phrase, the unison call, heads tipped back, beaks open, their breath turning to cloud in the cold. On still air it carries across the open marsh well before either bird comes into view.
Families move together through the winter, a brown-tinged juvenile kept close to its parents while it learns the edges of the marsh and the way to the feeding grounds. By spring it will leave them.
The crane has a second life in Japanese culture as a figure of long life and faithful marriage, woven into wedding kimono, family crests and sake labels, and folded a thousand times over in senbazuru, the strings of paper cranes made as a wish for recovery or peace. The bird in the Kushiro snow is a different thing from the clean white outline of the motif: mud on its legs, quarrelling over a patch of corn, now and then landing clumsily.
the return
Winter grounds, and the return from near extinction
In winter the cranes gather at a small number of grounds. From Otowa Bridge, above the Setsuri River near Tsurui, the view is of a couple of hundred birds standing in the shallow river where they roost, in water fed by springs that keep it from freezing, with steam lifting off the surface in the cold. The Akan International Crane Center, under an hour's drive from central Kushiro, runs a research and breeding programme beside a feeding ground where wild cranes come in through the winter.
The species came close to vanishing. Hunting in the Meiji era was thought to have ended it in Japan until, in 1924, a dozen or so birds were found alive in the Kushiro marsh, overlooked because the wetland was then thought worthless ground. In 1952 a winter survey counted only thirty-three, and the same year the crane was named a Special Natural Monument of Japan.
The recovery began with one farmer. In 1966 Yoshitaka Ito, a dairy farmer in Tsurui, began feeding a pair of cranes that had settled on his pasture, and kept on for two decades; in 1987 the Wild Bird Society of Japan opened a sanctuary on his land, the Tsurui-Ito Tancho Sanctuary. Winter feeding with corn, at his ground and others, carried the population through the months when the frozen marsh could not, and the Ministry of the Environment now puts Japan's red-crowned cranes at well over fifteen hundred birds.
The cranes are watched from the marked viewing grounds, at a distance and without noise, and some of the best mornings are the ones when a pair calls from far across the field and comes no closer.
Luxury Japan Travel brings guests to the cranes in winter through a Custom Tour of Japan, a private journey from five nights on the dates the party chooses, with a private car and driver every day and a Tour Director travelling with the guests. In eastern Hokkaidō in January and February, that means the cranes at Tsurui and Akan, the drift ice on the Sea of Okhotsk and an onsen ryokan on the shore of a frozen caldera lake, joined by the long white roads between them.
