Bears, Seabirds and Whales: Japan’s Wild Edges. By Joachim Theis

Rhinoceros Auklet

This is Part 3 of my four-part series on wildlife photography in Japan. In Part 2, I wrote about Japan’s winter bird spectacles, some of them sustained by supplementary feeding. In this post, I turn to animals that must fend for themselves: brown bears, seabirds, and whales on Japan’s northern and southern frontiers.

Click here for Part 2

Beyond bird spectacles

Watching eagles and cranes gather at feeding sites in Hokkaido made me appreciate how much effort goes into helping some of Japan’s most iconic birds survive the winter. But it also made me think about the animals that receive no such support. In Shiretoko, not far from those carefully managed bird sites, I encountered a very different story.

Female bear with cub looking for salmon

Mother and cub enjoying some salmon sashimi

Brown bears, Japan’s largest land animals and close relatives of North American grizzlies, live only in Hokkaido. Every autumn, they head to the rivers of Shiretoko for the salmon run, trying to build up enough fat reserves to survive the winter. From a distance, it looks like a classic wildlife scene: bears standing in rapids, catching and gorging on leaping fish. Up close, though, it felt more like a struggle—an intense competition for limited food.

Brown bear and cub on the shore

Brown bears and the struggle for salmon

A few years ago, I joined a Japanese wildlife tour for the chance to photograph brown bears catching salmon on the Shiretoko Peninsula. On the first day, we set up our tripods and cameras on a hillside overlooking a river that emptied into the sea. Over the next hours, we watched female bears with cubs and solitary males emerge from the mountains and forest to fish. It quickly became clear that catching salmon was far harder than wildlife documentaries make it look. Some bears failed to catch any fish at all and eventually gave up, having spent a great deal of energy crashing through the shallows and chasing salmon. Female bears, meanwhile, had to catch enough not only for themselves but for their cubs as well.

Bears passing a salmon fish farm

Fishing boats in Shiretoko

The bears were not only competing with one another. They were also competing with people, who were taking a large share of the salmon before the bears could reach them. Right beside the river stood a salmon farm, and farther offshore we could see boats fishing for salmon. It was hard not to wonder how much of the salmon was left for the bears.

Female brown bear with cubs on the rocky shore

Teuri Island and the returning auklets

Rhinoceros auklets spend most of the day fishing

A different kind of competition over food plays out every year on Teuri Island, off Hokkaido’s western coast. This little-known island is an important breeding ground for seabirds and supports huge colonies of rhinoceros auklets, spectacled guillemots, gulls, cormorants, and the endangered common murre.

On my first evening on the island, I went out to photograph the rhinoceros auklets as they returned to their burrows at dusk to feed their chicks. The steep cliffs were shrouded in thick fog, which made the birds difficult to see and even harder to photograph as they came in at around 80 kilometers an hour. They had to fly that fast to evade the piratical gulls trying to steal fish from them. Although I could barely see the birds in the fog, what I heard sounded like an aerial battle between auklets and gulls. The rapid beat of the approaching auklets’ wings reminded me of the stuttering idle of Rey’s speeder in The Force Awakens.

Rhinoceros auklet with catch on a foggy evening

Despite the poor visibility and fading light, I kept shooting, relying on sound almost as much as sight. After a while, I learned to distinguish the gulls from the auklets by ear. I watched the sky on my camera’s LCD screen and fired burst shots whenever a bird crossed my field of view. Most of my attempts failed, but a few frames of the auklets were in focus, fish visible in their beaks as they barreled toward the cliffs.

While auklet chicks remain safe and invisible in their burrows, gull chicks grow up in open nests, making for some fun photo opportunities

I also enjoyed photographing spectacled guillemots with their white eye patches and bright red feet

Ogasawara, the Galapagos of the East

Humpback diving in front of Ogasawara's famous "heart rock"

If Teuri feels remote, the Ogasawara Islands feel like a world apart. A few years after my first trips to Hokkaido, I joined a wildlife tour to Ogasawara to photograph humpback whales and seabirds. Often called the “Galapagos of the East,” the Ogasawara Islands are a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of Japan’s most carefully protected natural areas. The archipelago includes more than 30 islands and is known for its many endemic species. It is accessible only by a weekly ferry from Tokyo, a journey that takes about 24 hours each way.

Flying fish

Red-footed Booby

The ferry ride was long, but it was far from dull. I spent most of the daylight hours on deck with my fellow wildlife photographers and birdwatchers, and there was plenty to see. Shortly after leaving Tokyo Bay and passing the first of the Izu Islands, we spotted our first truly pelagic birds—albatrosses, petrels, and shearwaters. Those with excellent eyesight and good binoculars also had a chance to see flying fish, dolphins, and the occasional orca. But I struggled to pick out grey birds against the grey of the sky and sea.

Humpback mother with calf

I was the only non-Japanese in our group and our main guide spoke little English. Each evening, after spending fifteen minutes detailing the next day's schedule in Japanese, he would turn to me and deliver the ultimate summary: “We’ll leave at 6:30 in the morning.” As it turned out, that was the only vital piece of information I needed anyway.

During our stay in the archipelago, we spent most of the daylight hours on small boats in search of whales and seabirds. Out at sea, we encountered an abundance of humpback whale mothers with calves, as well as brown boobies, Bonin shearwaters, albatrosses, and spinner dolphins. The humpback whales spend the warmer months to feed in the rich waters of Kamchatka and Alaska, then travel thousands of kilometers each winter to Ogasawara’s warm waters to mate, give birth, and raise their calves.

There were so many whales that photographing their flukes as they dived was easy. What I really wanted, though, was a breaching whale. Often, by the time my camera found a whale rising from the water, the moment had already passed. Eventually, I used the same technique that had worked for the auklets in the fog: I switched to the LCD screen instead of the viewfinder so I could swing the camera more quickly toward the splash or the dark shape rising from the water while shooting in bursts.

Breaching humpback whale

Brown Booby

Leaving the islands, and looking ahead

When the time came to leave Ogasawara and return to Tokyo, half the island seemed to come down to the harbor to see the ferry off. Small boats followed us out, their passengers waving for as long as they could. A pod of dolphins swarm alongside the ferry, as if escorting us back into the open ocean. It felt like a scene from a film. As I watched the island recede into the distance, I felt emotional and very fortunate. Many people in Japan dream of visiting Ogasawara, but few manage to find the time.

Islanders wishing us a safe journey home

From the salmon rivers of Shiretoko to the seabird cliffs of Teuri and the whale-rich seas around Ogasawara, these journeys showed me how diverse and fragile Japan’s wildlife can be, even far from its big cities. They also made me think more about the changing relationship between people and nature: where humans intervene, where they step back, and what happens in the spaces they leave behind. In the final post in this series, I return to the mainland and to a quieter but equally important story unfolding across rural Japan, as the population ages, villages empty out, and wildlife begins to move back into places that people once called home.

Flotilla send us on our way

This is Part 3 of a four-part series about my experiences as a wildlife photographer in Japan.

Joachim Theis | joachimtheis@gmail.com
Instagram: @joa.wild