29 October 2026
Hello Everyone,
It is a refreshing fall day on the Canadian Prairies. We have had rain, wind, and summer temperatures, and sometimes it feels like we are on a roller coaster. The children on my block are gearing up for Halloween, hoping it is nice and they can fill their pumpkins with lots of goodies!
If you are a long-time reader of my blog, you know I don’t include ads, and I rarely promote products and services unless I am truly committed to them and believe they will add something to our lives. Today is a rare exception and, for good reason. If you are travelling and wish to join a small, well-organised photo tour, it can be extremely difficult to separate the extraordinary experience from the mundane. On the other hand, when you get it right, your trip is easy, full of exciting adventures, lots of birds, good food, new friends, and ‘knowledge’ – along with superior photography. You learn so much from good guides.
So, in the spirit of ‘giving’ and helping those planning a photo trip to Europe, Asia or dreaming of one in the future, I want to introduce you to Bird-Photo-Tours.
Remi Potier, a dear Polish reader and part of this wonderful company, compiled outstanding information on two incredible raptors you might see on a tour to Hokkaido. Have a read – the information is thorough, and it is what you would expect if you were there in person with their guides.
Full disclosure: I did not receive any compensation for posting the information about this company and Remi’s excellent guide to the eagles in this part of northern Japan. I am very grateful to small companies like theirs that enrich our travel experiences! When I was much, much younger, I loved the adventure of planning everything on my own, but now I find it much preferable to work with a company familiar with the area that can, if I wish, handle everything. I hope to one day join this group in northern Japan or Indonesia, two places I have enjoyed visiting in the past.
Thanks, Remi, for your great efforts in educating us today!
The Bald Eagle’s Giant Cousins: Following Steller’s Sea Eagles to the Hokkaido Ice
If you have spent a winter watching a Bald Eagle nest cam, you already know the family. The Bald Eagle is one of eight sea and fish eagles in the genus Haliaeetus, and two of its cousins gather every February on the drifting sea ice of eastern Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. One of them, the Steller’s Sea Eagle, is the heaviest eagle on Earth. The other, the White-tailed Eagle, is the bird that Eurasian nest-cam watchers know from Scotland, Poland and the Baltic.
I lead small bird-photography groups in Asia, and the Hokkaido winter is the trip people ask about most. What follows is not a camera guide. It is the story of where these eagles come from, why they end up on the ice, what is quietly killing them inland, and how to watch a roost or a floe full of eagles without being the reason they leave.
Steller’s Sea Eagle, Haliaeetus pelagicus, on the Nemuro Channel ice. © Bird-Photo-Tours ASIA
A bird built for cold water
A large female Steller’s Sea Eagle can weigh close to 9 kg, with a wingspan approaching 2.5 m. Set her next to a Bald Eagle and the difference is obvious: the bill is enormous and deep orange-yellow, the shoulders and tail are brilliant white against black, and the whole bird looks heavier than it should be able to fly. Carrying that weight has a cost. Researchers in Kamchatka estimate a Steller’s burns a full day’s energy in about 45 minutes of flapping flight, which is why the species nests within a short glide of salmon rivers and coasts.
The entire world population breeds along one stretch of the Russian Far East: Kamchatka, the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, northern Sakhalin and the lower Amur. BirdLife International lists the species as Vulnerable, with a small and regionally declining population; estimates in the scientific literature run from roughly 4,000 to 6,000 birds. For comparison, there are more Bald Eagles in Minnesota alone.
Alongside it on the ice is the White-tailed Eagle, Haliaeetus albicilla. It is the Bald Eagle’s closest relative, the Old World half of a sister pair, and in Hokkaido it is the more numerous of the two. Both are fish eagles first, scavengers second, and that second habit is where the trouble starts.
White-tailed Eagle, Haliaeetus albicilla, the Bald Eagle’s closest relative. © Bird-Photo-Tours ASIA
Following the ice south
In November the Russian coast freezes and the eagles move. A few hundred stay in Kamchatka or along the Okhotsk shore; around 2,000 cross to the southern Kuril Islands and Hokkaido. The first birds reach the Shiretoko Peninsula in late November. The spectacle, though, waits for the sea ice.
Each winter pack ice forms in the Sea of Okhotsk and drifts south until it jams against Shiretoko, usually in late January or February. The eagles treat the floes the way Bald Eagles treat a cottonwood over a Prairie river: a safe perch with food underneath. Fish killed or stunned by the ice, discards from the Rausu fishing fleet and the odd dead seal gather both species in numbers you will not see anywhere else. On a good morning in the Nemuro Channel our groups have counted well over a hundred eagles on the ice within sight of the boat, most of them within a few hundred metres of the harbour.
Two places matter. Rausu, a small fishing port on the Shiretoko side, is where the pre-dawn boats go out into the channel between Hokkaido and Kunashiri. Lake Furen, on the Nemuro Peninsula, is the other big wintering area, a frozen lagoon with reedbeds where both eagles share the ice with Whooper Swans. Both sites are designated National Wildlife Protection Areas. We run a Japan winter bird photography tour around these two sites every February, timed for the ice; the same ten days take in the Red-crowned Cranes at Tsurui and the Blakiston’s Fish Owl, the largest owl in the world.
Steller’s Sea Eagle over the floes off Rausu, February. © Bird-Photo-Tours ASIA
The window is short. By mid-March the ice retreats, the adults leave first, and the birds that linger into April are mostly immatures. In that sense the Hokkaido eagles behave exactly like the Bald Eagles that stage on open water below hydro dams in Manitoba or Saskatchewan in winter: they are where the fish are, for as long as the fish are there.
The deer, the bullet and the eagle
Readers who follow North American raptor rehab will know what comes next. In the mid-1990s Hokkaido’s fisheries were in decline, and the eagles did what Bald Eagles do when fish are short: they went inland and found carcasses. The carcasses were Sika deer, shot by hunters who took the meat and left the gut piles and heads in the forest. The deer had been killed with lead rifle bullets, and lead bullets fragment.
The first lead-poisoned Steller’s Sea Eagle was recorded at Abashiri in 1996. By the winter of 1997–98, 19 eagles were found dying or dead between December and May. Within a decade the toll stood at 92 Steller’s and 37 White-tailed Eagles confirmed dead of lead poisoning, and the Kushiro Zoo, which took in the sick birds, became an unwilling expert on the condition. A population model published in 2000 predicted that the Hokkaido wintering flock would fall from about 1,500 birds to under 1,000 within a century, driven almost entirely by adult deaths from lead.
Hokkaido moved faster than most jurisdictions. Lead rifle bullets were banned for deer hunting in 2000, lead shot in 2001, and in 2004 all lead ammunition was prohibited for hunting large animals on the island. Japan went further in 2014 and banned possession of lead ammunition in Hokkaido. Deaths fell sharply. They did not stop. A Hokkaido University survey of birds found dead between 2015 and 2018 attributed 26.5% of recorded Steller’s Sea Eagle deaths and 5.9% of White-tailed Eagle deaths to lead, and isotope analysis of the fragments showed the ammunition was being used illegally.
If that sounds familiar, it should. The same mechanism kills Bald and Golden Eagles across the Prairies and the Midwest every hunting season, and the same policy argument is being had over copper bullets. Hokkaido is simply twenty years further down the road, and it offers a lesson in both directions: a ban works, and a ban alone is not enough.
Watching the roost without emptying it
A wintering eagle lives on a tight energy budget. Remember the 45-minute figure: every time a Steller’s lifts off a floe because a person walked too close, it spends calories it gathered from a fish it may not replace that day. Disturbance in February is not a nuisance to these birds, it is a cost. These are the rules our groups work to, and most of them transfer directly to a Bald Eagle roost on a Canadian river.
- Let the boat do the approaching. On the Rausu cruises the eagles have habituated to the boats over thirty winters and will land on floes a few metres off the bow. The same bird will flush at 200 m from a person on foot. If you can watch from a vehicle, a blind or a boat, do so.
- Never walk onto the ice or the shoreline below a roost. At Lake Furen we stay on the road and the designated viewpoints. Birds that flush from a frozen lake have nowhere closer to land than the next frozen lake.
- Dawn and dusk are off limits for close approach. Eagles leave the night roost on the first thermals and return in the last light; both are the moments when a flushed bird loses the most. Photograph the roost from a distance, or not at all.
- Do not put out food. The Rausu boats carry fish and the practice is openly debated among photographers and researchers; it concentrates birds and changes their behaviour. On land, baiting a roost with fish or carrion is illegal in the protection areas and, as the lead story shows, feeding eagles carcasses is exactly how the trouble began.
- Read the bird, not the distance. A Steller’s that stops feeding, stands tall and stares at you has already told you that you are too close. Head-bobbing and wing-lifting come next. Back off before the third signal, which is take-off.
- Watch the supporting cast. Blakiston’s Fish Owls are photographed from heated hides at a handful of sites where the owners manage the fish ponds; we never spotlight, call or approach a wild owl. The crane roosts on the Setsuri River are watched from a bridge at first light and nowhere else.
- Leave the inland deer carcasses alone. If you find one with eagles on it, report it to the local Wild Bird Society office rather than approaching it. Sick birds on a carcass are often lead cases, and the Kushiro rehabilitation centre needs the location, not a photograph.
Red-crowned Cranes, Grus japonensis, at the Tsurui feeding grounds. © Bird-Photo-Tours ASIA
Blakiston’s Fish Owl, Bubo blakistoni, photographed from a managed hide. © Bird-Photo-Tours ASIA
None of this is Japanese etiquette. It is the same field discipline that keeps a Prairie Bald Eagle roost in use year after year, written down for a place where the eagles are rarer and the cold is sharper.
What a nest-cam watcher can take from Hokkaido
The Steller’s Sea Eagle has no nest cam and probably never will; its nests are on cliffs and river bluffs in roadless Russia. What it has instead is a wintering ground that puts a Vulnerable species within reach of a small town’s fishing boats and a few thousand visitors a year. The money those visitors bring is a large part of why Rausu’s fleet now defends the eagles it once competed with.
For anyone who has followed a Bald Eagle family through a season online, the Hokkaido story closes a loop. The lead problem you read about from Iowa and Manitoba has a twenty-year case study on the other side of the Pacific. The disturbance rules at a Prairie roost are the same rules on the ice. And the bird on the floe, with its absurd bill and white shoulders, is recognisably family.
If you are ever tempted to see it for yourself, February is the month, Rausu and Lake Furen are the places, and a boat is the kindest way to get close. We cover Hokkaido and the rest of the region in our bird watching tours across Asia, but the eagles belong to no one, and the cheapest way to meet them is still a rental car, a thermos and a lot of patience on a cold road.
Thank you so much for being with us today! Please check out their website and pass this information along to anyone you know that is wanting to join a photography bird group. They can contact Remi directly for more information:
Remi Potier: bird-photo-tours.com
Remi’s e-mail: remi@uxray.io
Take care!
Thank you to Remi Potier and Bird Photo Tours for their excellent essay and their wonderful adventures!
