I’m going to need some bigger superlatives to describe the boat trips out of Rausu, on Hokkaido on my Wild Images tour, probably made more exciting because we had resigned ourselves to missing the much-desired pack ice, which had not yet reached Rausu this winter. We had watched the tourist boats trying to make the best of things, throwing fish for the eagles just outside the harbour walls the day before and had thought we might be able to do something with flight shots in some interesting early morning light maybe if we were lucky. Well we needn’t have worried. ‘The ice is here’ said an excited Otani San first thing next morning. It had arrived overnight to the coast, a short distance north of Rausu and very much within our reach. A thin line of white on the skyline marked the front edge of the drift ice that forms every winter to the north of Hokkaido in Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk, at 44 degrees, the most southerly drift ice in the northern hemisphere. This would be like having sea ice in the Bay of Biscay!!! As we approached the ice in our jet-boats we could see that the eagles were already waiting for us. Around 300 of them eventually gathered on the ice around the boats, which were expertly bumped into the ice and were soon surrounded by a wildlife photographer’s dream of subjects. Again, like the cranes it could be tricky to isolate them and there was so much going on it was a challenge to decide what to do with such a bewildering array of possibilities that included flight and action shots, with or against the sunrise.
Portraits either close-up or from a distance of singles or groups of Steller’s Sea Eagles or White-tailed Eagles, separately or with both species side-by-side, showing the huge size difference (it is amazing to see the massive White-tailed Eagle dwarfed by Steller’s)? Landscape format or portrait format? Don’t forget the latter for uses other than a desktop monitor! Flight shots against the gorgeous forested hillside or snowy mountain backdrops? Motion blurred flight shots? The list goes on and from time to time I simply watched the action away from my viewfinder. The eagles can be very close, sometimes within the 5m minimum focussing distance of the 500 and I was cutting bits off all over the place too, wings and tails etc. However, it worked well to isolate birds and after our four boat trips I preferred using it to the 70-200mm as nothing touches it for clarity at an ideal range, despite my arms aching a bit from shooting so much, something that I never felt before. However, a 200-600mm or 100-400mm zoom lens has got to be the way to go for an all allrounder in combination with a full frame sensor. As for the eagle sea ice spectacle itself, it is certainly one of the best things I have ever seen and although I hate making lists, it must be a new entry to my top five or ten, I suppose. If you haven’t seen it yet, then shove it up the bucket list and make sure you do!
It was great to hook up with Birdquest colleague Dave Farrow, who was guiding a Sunrise Birding group with Gina and Steve. As we cruised along the coast towards the sea ice on our second outing… ‘Is that a Thayer’s Gull?’, it eventually got the nod from Otani San with his Japanese photo guide of hybrid gulls. One of my favourites too, it is a shame that it has been relegated to subspecific status with Iceland Gull but it was great to see a perfect adult, straight off the page of Klaus Malling Olsen’s ‘Gulls’. It had travelled a long way to get to northern Japan from Arctic Canada. There were lots of other gulls here too. Mostly Slaty-backed but also a few Glaucous-winged and Glaucous in that order of abundance. Vega Gull is only to be found far to the south in Honshu in winter. On another boat trip a group of three Stejneger’s Scoters flew past Rausu harbour mouth and on most others, there were usually a few Spectacled Guillemots on the sea as we travelled to and from the area of drift ice just to the north of Rausu.
We woke up next morning and it was snowing. Quite heavily in fact. There had been about 10cm overnight and it was still falling. We called in at Seicomart in Rausu and loaded up with breakfast items before heading south. There were folks clearing the snow off their drives and the stretches of road adjacent to them everywhere but there were hardly any vehicles out and about yet. In fact, the gas stations were mostly closed, as were the shops and restaurants all the way to Nemuro. Rolling up at a very snowy Lake Furen, the guys at Hotel Sunseto were preparing to put out fish for the eagles and kites that hang around here. This is a different opportunity to what you get at Rausu, a mass of eagles fighting over fish scraps on a snow-covered (today) frozen lake. It can produce some very interesting results but is more about getting down for a low perspective, blasting away on high burst and hoping for a nice distribution of eagles across the frame. At least the blizzard conditions made the images more artistic with snowflakes right across the subjects. Motion blurring both the snow and eagles can be interesting too. There were more White-tailed than Steller’s here and both were outnumbered by Black-eared Kites, the most we had seen on the tour by far. Finally, many thanks to our Man-in-Japan Otani Chikara, whose experience and expertise made our tour very successful!
