The Red-Crowned Crane, Tancho in Japanese, stands at 150 to 158 cm (4ft to 5 ft) tall, weighing 8 to 11 kg (17 to 25) pounds with an enormous wingspan measuring 200 to 260 cm (6.5 ft to 8.5 ft) and live more than 60 years. On average, they are the heaviest crane species on the earth.
At one time, the Red-crowned Crane was thought to be extinct in Japan, falling prey to a reduced number of wetlands and the continued encroachment by people farming land that was once untouched. During the Taisho Era, a small number of Red-crowned Cranes were discovered in the Kushiro region of Hokkaido. This region is part of my annual Hokkaido Birding adventure, but only one of many locations I have scouted during my more than two decades of photographing in Japan.
The Japanese government, having just learned the price of lacking conservation efforts, with the extinction of Niigata Prefecture’s Toki in 1918, the government immediately declared the Tancho a protected species and designated a National treasure of Japan in 1924, and conservation efforts have been in place since that time. In 2019, the Hokkaido Prefectural Government recorded a record number of Red-crowned Cranes in Hokkaido, over 1,000 in large part due to continued efforts to preserve the snow ballerinas in Japan.