When photographing crested ibises every morning and evening, I sometimes come across unexpected birds. This time, I’d like to introduce a rare migratory bird that I managed to photograph for the first time in four years since moving to Sado.
I had my camera ready as usual when a long-beaked silhouette caught my eye, reflected on the surface of a rice paddy. For a split second, I thought it was an ibis, but something was clearly off. The beak was about the same length as an ibis’s, yet the face was noticeably smaller—roughly two sizes smaller.
Captivated by this unfamiliar bird, I kept pressing the shutter. Back home, I searched its features and discovered it was a Far Eastern curlew. Its small face makes that long beak stand out all the more.
A Far Eastern curlew with its beak covered in mud after catching a mole cricket. (©Fumie Oyama)
The Far Eastern curlew measures about 60 cm (around 24 inches) in length, making it one of the largest shorebirds. It has a remarkably long beak—roughly three times the length of its head—and long legs. It breeds in eastern Siberia and winters in Southeast Asia, including Australia and the Philippines. With only around 10,000 to 20,000 individuals remaining worldwide, it is classified as endangered, a decline due in part to the loss of tidal flats through land reclamation.
An Unexpected Stopover
The curlew I photographed was perched on a rice field ridge. According to Masaoki Tsuchiya, head of the Sado branch of the Wild Bird Society of Japan, the island has no large tidal flats, yet the species turns up every year in flooded rice paddies, which serve as a practical substitute.
The bird’s main migration route through Japan follows tidal flats along the Pacific coast, so individuals appearing on Sado, on the Sea of Japan side, are considered off course. Perhaps for this reason, they have only ever been spotted alone in Sado. Does this curlew prefer solitude, or is it simply self-sufficient? Could it even be the same individual returning each year? Unlike ibises, curlews cannot be tracked with leg bands, so there is no way to know.
The curved beak makes up about one-third of the bird’s body length. (©Fumie Oyama)
Feeding in the Fields
The curlew I found along the ridge bent its neck and drove its long beak deep into the soil, probing for food. It was endearing to watch, though it seemed far less efficient at feeding than an ibis.
An ibis’s beak is packed with nerve endings all the way to the tip, allowing it to sense the faint movements of small creatures hidden in the mud—almost like a sensor—and catch them with precision. The curlew’s beak works differently, so it probed repeatedly, taking much longer to find anything.
A solitary Far Eastern curlew. (©Fumie Oyama)
I also tried something new: high-speed continuous shooting at 30 frames per second, stitched together like a flipbook. Back in elementary school, I used to secretly draw slightly different images in the corners of textbook pages and flip them to create the illusion of movement. Doing the same with photographs produced a quality of motion unlike video.
I spent three days photographing the curlew. It was seen for about a week before disappearing. Most likely, it was a lone bird resting on Sado before continuing north. All I can do is hope it finds its way back next season.
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This is the 33rd in the series Sado Wildlife in Focus by photojournalist Fumie Oyama.
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