Izumi crane migration grounds

The Izumi crane migration grounds cover a 245ha paddy field area of Izumi plain in the northwest of Kagoshima Prefecture known for the about ten-thousand cranes which pass the winter there from every year mid October to March.

The cranes come over with the north and northwest winds from mid October to mid November. Each year there are about 10,000 hooded cranes, 3,000 white-naped cranes and also small numbers of common cranes, demoiselle cranes, sandhill cranes and Siberian cranes. They pass the winter eating rice plants, cyperaceae weed, japonicus steud, eleocharis acicularis, eleocharis Kuroguwai Ohwi, potatoes, frogs, snails, viviparidae, grasshoppers and so on. People also feed them about 70 tonnes of wheat, chaff, brown rice, soybeans and so on. The cranes in Izumi are carefully protected. For example, the roosting grounds are set in marshy areas so they cannot be attacked by Japanese raccoons and Japanese mink. On the other hand, farmers in the area have had to set up guard nets around their fields so the cranes cannot damage crops. Before they leave the area, the cranes are given about 8 tonnes of sardines before heading north. They go up in a circular pattern and fly away to the north with the convection currents, which comes up by west or northwest wind on a clear day from early February to late March.

The breeding sites for the hooded cranes flying to Izumi are the marshes from Lake Baikal to the mid and upper stream of the River Amur. The cranes also winter in the Yatsushiro basin in Yamaguchi, Daegu in Korea, the marshes of Goryeong and the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the Yangtze River in China and so on. There are many cranes which change their wintering places depending on the climate conditions of the year, so the number of cranes flying to the Izumi plain changes from year to year.

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Wikipedia