Thanks for the further info kb57 - I was going to ask if you hired a car on Hokkaido. I have no itinerary in mind yet just need to be in Fukuoka for 22nd February 2020 so will plan to travel north from there. Did you do a trip report? How long would you recommend in Hokkaido? Sorry for all the questions!
Hi, sorry I didn't do a trip report - meant to at the time - there's a little more information on my 2018 year list thread.
Our itinerary was:
Day 1: Fly Hong Kong - Tokyo - Kushiro, arriving late so stayed in city centre near station (got airport bus to town)
Day 2: Picked up hire car, drove to Kushiro wetland centre (not much about in winter, would be good site in spring) then on to Tsurui for cranes. Stayed at Heart n'Tree guesthouse near Tsurui (via Booking.co, highly recommended!)
Day 3: Dawn at Otawa bridge for cranes, back to guesthouse for breakfast / birdtable, then drove to Yoroushi Onsen (fish owl & Ural owl) via Lake Kussharo (whoopers)
Day 4: Chilling at Yoroushi Onsen, finding solitary snipe further down river & more fish-owl action
Day 5: Drove to Furen Lodge via Notsuke Peninsula (sea duck, sea-eagles)
Day 6: Ochiishi (Asian rosy-finch, harlequin duck), day truncated by bad weather - Furen Lodge again
Day 7: Sea-eagle feeding at Lake Furen, drove back to Heart n'Tree via Lake Kussharo (my partner really likes whooper swans...) and another visit to cranes at Tsurui - this time checking ring numbers at visitor centre with scopes set up in centre, and looking up when / where they were fledged
Day 8: Drive Tsurui - Kushiro station, return car and bus to airport, flight to Tokyo
If I did it again I'd perhaps spend one less day at Yoroushi, which is expensive (but high quality) as we got the fish-owl first night, but we booked two as I wanted to maximise chance of success. Photographers prefer the set-up at the site near Rausu, as you are watching through glass in the hotel lounge at Yoroushi. I'd have done the boat trip from Rausu with the spare day, as kittykat32's party did - probably the main flaw in my itinerary.
The cancelled pelagic (organised through Take-san at Furen Lodge) couldn't be helped due to weather conditions, and resulted in one day where we didn't do that much apart from kerb-crawl past the well-known aggressive guy's house in Ochiishi looking at tree sparrows on his feeders (we found the rosy-finches eventually with the help of one of kittykat32's party nearer the harbour).
So, to answer your question, you could get the 'big three' in a week or less, cranes and sea-eagles are absolutely 100% nailed on certainties, but NE Hokkaido in winter is a magical place and deserving of a slightly slower pace if you can manage it.
Driving is fine on winter tyres, roads do get snow on them but are wide and lightly trafficked, and ploughed promptly. The bilingual instruction booklet that came with the hire car was the most comprehensive I have ever seen, enabling us to master the satnav controls (buttons in Japanese, but can give directions in English). Things like washing machine instructions are a bit more of a challenge, which is where Google Translate comes in handy. We were never seriously handicapped by language - few people speak English fluently, but most people understand more than they think, even if they are sometimes a little embarassed about using it.
As far as food is concerned, you can be as adventurous as you want - I dived in and bought plum-flavoured seaweed strips on arrival in Tokyo airport, but things like sandwiches are available in the 7-11s and other roadside stores.