A trip to Hachigoro Toshima wetland, a Ramsar listed wetland near Kinosaki. I was looking for the Oriental Stork, however unfortunately all the storks were away travelling. Luckily there were ducks and heron aplenty. The oriental stork was considered extinct in Japan since the 1970s however a breeding program has since established a wild population again.
The trip did remind me of Aldo Leopold’s beautiful writing about cranes in A Sand Country Almanac:
A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place. Yearly since the ice age it has wakened each spring to the clangor of cranes. The peat layers that comprise the bog are laid down in the basin of an ancient lake. The cranes stand, as it were, upon the sodden pages of their own history. These peats are the compressed remains of the mosses that clogged the pools, of the tamaracks that spread over the moss, of the ice sheet. An endless caravan of generations has built of its own bones this bridge into the future, this habitat where the oncoming host again may live and breed and die.
…
And so they live and have their being- these cranes – not in the constricted present, but in the wider reaches of evolutionary time. Their annual return is the ticking of the geological clock. Upon the place of their return they confer a peculiar distinction. Amid the endless mediocrity of the commonplace, a crane marsh holds a paleontological patent of nobility, won in the march of aeons, and revocable only by shotgun. The sadness discernible in some marshes arises, perhaps, from their once having harbored cranes. Now they stand humbled, adrift in history.