*Blakiston’s Fish Owl, Yoroushi, Hokkaido February 2020*

On my recent Wild Images Japan Winter Wildlife Spectacular tour I was lucky to visit the delightful Yoroushi Onsen in Nakashibetsu, set in a pretty little river valley with a rushing stream flowing past the elongated hotel building. Outside the lobby/restaurant area is a bird feeding station, visited by numerous tits (Great, Marsh, Willow and Long-tailed), Eurasian Nuthatches, both Great Spotted and Japanese Pygmy Woodpeckers and Eurasian Jays. However, the thick glass of the huge windows results in a distinct lack of sharpness unless you photograph perpendicular to the panes. It was a lovely place to sit and watch the birds though. The rooms had by far the best views of the tour, with a pair of Brown Dippers feeding nearby and the food here was the runaway winner of the ‘Best Food of the Tour’ contest. While a fairly indulgent and unnecessarily luxurious stay, the main the reason we were here was for an appointment with the largest owl in the world, Blakiston’s Fish Owl.

The owl obliged at 9.27pm, after our evening meal, with a visit to its fish-stocked pool, a kind of ‘owl McDonalds’ but not before an American Mink had sneaked in and pinched one! Unfortunately, as well as a huge bright green Darvic ring on its left leg and a metal one on its right, the owl seemed to have an injured left eye. No wonder it had resorted to an easy life of stuffing itself with the endless supply of fish from the onsen. From some angles it was possible to lose both of these unsightly features. The owl was close, only around 4m away from the window on the banks of the tiny, floodlit pool and around 100mm seemed to be an ideal focal length. I decided to opt for a ISO1600/slow shutter speed portrait on a tripod with the 70-200mm lens. While its feathers were fluffed up and covered its leg irons, I was disappointed with its gammy eye and the background of wooden planks on the opposite side of the stream, which needed to be photo-shopped out later. The owl’s fish pool was restocked at 6pm and 4.00am and next morning it was back for breakfast at 5.30am, just before it started to get light. Checking recent sightings on the calendar at reception it seems we were unlucky not have an early evening visit by the owl. The other stars of Yoroushi were the gorgeous Sable that have moved in under the decking of the restaurant area after being absent (well, having been removed!) in 2019. Like the owl, the Sables were very tricky to capture in a photogenic situation among all the man-made bits and pieces of the bird feeding area but there were a couple of spots where this was possible together with some photo-shopping of obvious straight lines. They are fast moving too! We saw at least three different animals, one with a darker face than the pair that live under the decking. Solitary Snipe and Crested Kingfisher are also seen occasionally from the hotel windows along the stream, but we had no luck with either. The snipe has apparently not been seen this winter. The hotel had two onsens and the outside pool in the second smaller one in the new block was particularly nice to have to myself next morning with a dipper singing on the stream.

After a very late check out following the owl night vigil we headed northeast for another owl appointment. We would not normally plan to have the owl nights back-to-back for obvious reasons but this year demand for accommodation was such that it was unavoidable. On the eastern shore of the Shiretoko Peninsula lies Rausu, another true mecca for world birders. Not only is it known as being THE historic main site for Blakiston’s Fish Owl, it also hosts a winter gathering of around 300 eagles, mostly the awe-inspiring Steller’s Sea Eagle. We checked in early to our accommodation at Rausu, the famous Washino-Yado Minshuku, which has become synonymous with the big fish owl, with a view to setting up tripods for the owl session. We should be done by 7pm and have a good night’s sleep, right? No. Unfortunately the owls(!) did not show up until 3.30am next morning, probably owing to a frustratingly large number of noisy comings and goings by prospective owl watchers. The minshuku and adjacent restaurant are the usual places that folks shoot the owls from but I took a chance from the old bus that is snowed into the stream bank and although a little further away, faces the owl pools.

The bus was great until the heater packed in around 10pm. Again flash is not allowed here but the light from the strobe lights that flash at around 1/90 sec was sufficient to opt for the recommended settings of 1/80 sec shutter speed, ISO 3200 and an aperture of f/5.6 with the 500. At 1/125 sec every other frame is black on the 1DX’s high burst mode owing to the strobe effect so pushing up the ISO is the only realistic alternative if you want any kind of action shot. The owls usually fly off in the direction of the bus, but they leave the floodlit area very quickly and I wasn’t excited about the possibility of a flight shot. If only I could have chosen my company in the bus though. There was one chap who went out for a leak behind the bus twice and persisted in having long loud mobile phone conversations and then there was another person who actually went outside the bus to make a phone call too!!! Unbelievable, particularly bearing in mind that the owls usually fly in from the valley behind the bus. This combined with the early-evening-only visitors probably caused the owls to wait until things quietened down. At 7.34pm I wondered why some dipstick was rocking the bus back and forth but when I looked around for the culprit everyone appeared to be sat still and eventually the rocking movement stopped. I thought nothing more of it until someone asked at breakfast next morning if I had felt the earthquake!!! Flipping heck! It was a big one, at 7 on the Richter Scale. Luckily it was located deep off the coast of Hokkaido, centred at 44.7 degrees north, 148.9 degrees east with a depth of 160 km and did not present a tsunami risk. After Fukushima it seems there are tsunami warnings all along the coast of Hokkaido with risk areas and safe zones clearly marked out. Seeing all of this, I was quite happy to stay way upslope in Shiretoko National Park after our night at Washino-Yado, even if we are talking about a 200 years event!

*Washino-Yado, Rausu February 2020. The fish owl pool is towards the left corner.*

Time ticked away and I took a break myself from 11.30pm to 3am, after which I knew there was usually another flurry of sightings. Sure enough, BAM! At just before 3.30am both owls showed up, the branch of the tree they sat on bent under their combined weight. They dropped down to the fish pool and took a fish each but then disaster struck. The mobile phone call/weak bladdered guy turns up and walks up to the minshuku, almost falls through the window and flushes them. I will be very happy not to meet him again. However, after another nervous wait one of the owls returned twice, at 4.50am and 5.20am. The views from the bus were a little different to the usual side on shot and happily everyone that wanted to managed some images. As dawn approached the eagles started to leave their roosting sites in the valley, washi means eagle in Japanese and the lodge here is actually named after the eagles rather than the owls. Up to three Brown Dippers were now active by the fish owl pools in the stream and it was soon time for breakfast, our only western style one of the tour but by now we all missed a super-healthy Japanese seafood-based breakfast.

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