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Japan field Guides/Books. (1 Viewer)

keith

Well-known member
I'm going to Hokkaido, Japan, in a year or so and was wondering what the best bird guide/books were recommended by birders who've been there, any information would be greatly appreciated, including tips, hints etc.
 
I use the Mark Brazil "Birds of East Asia". What time of year are you planning to visit?
 
We're looking at February, 2015 for Stella's Sea Eagle, Japanese Crane and Blakiston's Fish Owl amongst others. We will have a guide but I would still like a decent field Guide to bone up on stuff before we go, also I like to know a bit about the culture and history of places beforehand.
 
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Hokkaido, east Hokkaido in particular is a very different place to the rest of Japan. It was only settled by the Japanese relatively recently and still has a frontier feel about it. It is a great place you will enjoy it I'm sure.
 
Thanks for your help, much appreciated, I must confess I'm a bit suprised that Japan doesn't have it's own field guide.
 
I moved this thread to the Japan forum.

I concur the Mark Brazil guide is the best option, I'd also recommend picking up a photographic guide too (the best one is ISBN4-635-07007-7).

February is probably the best time to vist east Hokkaido.
 
My advice to birders who do not speak Japanese is to try to get hold of the out-of-date and out-of-print, but available secondhand 'A Field Guide to the Birds of Japan' (FGBJ) illustrated by Takano that Ed Keeble mentions above in this thread. In my opinion, it will enhance your trip, and especially your planning. If possible, get the Mark Brazil guide (Birds of East Asia - BEA) as well, and also a photo guide such as the one Hokkaido Stu links to. If you are only going to Hokkaido, may I recommend 'The Wild Birds of Hokkaido' which is a photo guide in Japanese. The pages have English and binomial names, but the index has binomial only. It gives stars for rarity, and coloured dots for habitat, but unfortunately the seasonal information is only in the Japanese text.

If you have all three, you can use FGBJ for an overview and planning, BEA for detailed information, and the Hokkaido WBH photos, so you can see what's around in Hokkaido specifically.

Why do I recommend this out-of-date FGBJ despite the fact that it has old names for birds which have been split or re-named, and whose pictures (paintings) have come in for criticism from some sources, and where some of the distribution information may be out of date? What's wrong with the much more up-to-date 'Birds of East Asia'?

The main point is that the Takano book (FGBJ) contains Japanese birds and only Japanese birds (including accidentals and extinct species) while Brazil's book (BEA) covers a far larger area.

About half of the birds in BEA have never been seen in Japan (Brazil's book has almost exactly 1,000 species, and the FGBJ about 500). In addition, it is sometimes the case that the sub-species which occurs in Japan is not illustrated in BEA.

Thus with BEA you have to search through for your Japanese birds, and your bird may not be illustrated anyway, so you have to read through a long description of sometimes numerous continental sub-species to find out what the bird in Japan is supposed to look like. FGBJ, because it only covers Japan and Japanese sub-species, has more room for alternative poses and views. In my opinion, from a practical use point of view, FGBJ has better illustrations (I seem to be in a minority on this, however; but the BEA illustrations certainly vary in quality). Also FGBJ has identification pointers on the illustrations; BEA does not.

Furthermore, Japan is long and narrow, and so many species only occur in a limited area. Therefore it might be the case that only 10-20% of the birds in BEA will be relevant to your trip to Hokkaido at a specific season, while 25-50% of FGBJ may be relevant.

In addition, looking through FGBJ will give you an overview of what you may see (it may encourage you to expand your trip beyond Hokkaido). With BEA, far too many of the birds you see when flicking through and say, 'That looks interesting', will turn out not to be Japanese at all. It's dispiriting (in my opinion, anyway)

Another significant point is that FGBJ gives the birds' English names (sometimes changed now, due to splitting) but also the Japanese names in roman script. (BEA is purely English.) This means you can have some contact with local birders you meet maybe over dinner at a Japanese inn. I think it's fun to learn some local names, even if you are going around with an English-speaking guide. FGBJ is still in print in Japanese, and most Japanese birders are familiar with it, so if you are with a group and see a bird, they can often find it in the English FGBJ, to help you indentify it, even if they don't speak English, which they can't do with BEA.

Another thing is that the maps in FGBJ are 2.5cm square, and those in BEA are 2.2cm on a side, but BEA tries to fit in more information about seasonal location over a wider geographical area, and so many of the BEA maps need a magnifying glass to see what they are about.

Anyway, I think even think the out-of-dated-ness of FGBJ can be a good thing for you if you can afford the other books as well. If you use FGBJ as a base and overview, and then annotate the book with up-to-date names (about 5% of species, maybe) using BEA (or by posting here and asking users what they have changed), or looking around on the internet, and also maybe Hokkaido specific information, then you will have learnt a lot about the birds you will see in the process.

The thing a lot of English birders in Japan would like is for Mark Brazil's publisher to select the Japanese birds, get Mark to trim his description so it is Japan-centred, and publish a Japan bird guide (and the same for Korea). Although BEA is a wonderful achievement, it falls between several stools in its current form. For Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, it's a poor guidebook in the sense that a lot of stuff is not relevant. For China it has a relevance problem (our Japanese summer birds don't winter there, so a lot of the book is irrelevant to them also) and it cuts out arbitrarily in the middle of China. Despite what the cover declares, it covers only a part of China and pacific coastal Russia.
 
There is also a photographic guide in English (which has romanized Japanese names too). The photos aren't as helpful as the Japanese only guides however and the text is pretty minimal.

Mark Brazil's book is supposedly coming out as an ebook (on ios only) soon. If you have an ipone/ipad that would be very useful.
 
There is also a photographic guide in English (which has romanized Japanese names too). The photos aren't as helpful as the Japanese only guides however and the text is pretty minimal.

Mark Brazil's book is supposedly coming out as an ebook (on ios only) soon. If you have an ipone/ipad that would be very useful.

I haven't got that photo guide. It didn't get terribly good reviews. And if it's got 520 species but also covers north-east Asia, as it claims, then it is presumably not comprehensive.

If it was in electronic form, I suppose that the publisher of Brazil's book could, in theory, allow the reader to choose only the birds that appear in one country, and allow other forms of selection (i.e. make an app, not an e-book). And they could put in pictures of the Japanese sub-species where needed, since the space constraints of paper publication would not apply.

I don't know why the Wild Bird Society of Japan don't make an e-book or app using the material they already have? They could update the names in no time at all. Indeed, they could update with new species and stuff fairly easily, too. Either way - app or update - they could make themselves a few yen from all the foreign birders. I often wonder why they stopped publishing it? Maybe it didn't sell well. Maybe it's because it was published before cheap international travel came to Japan; but cheap travel has come, so if they did a little work on the book now, they might have a useful seller.

But I stick to my point: the FGBJ gives a good overview, and if it's available for $30 secondhand as Ed Keeble's link suggests, and the OP is completely new to Japan, then I think it's worth it.

Mind you, with a few days careful cutting and pasting from Hakodate Birding, the OP could probably make his own Hokkaido Bird Guide with top quality photos. ;)
 
He'd only get a few of the commoner species alas..........

Well, having just counted the species on the website sidebar, it seems he could get about 240, quite a few of which are not easy to find (some pelagics, for example). Since there are about 550 Japanese species, but only about 350 to 400 'regulars' (that is, not accidentals, or exceptionally localised, but including regular every year offshore like at Hegura, for example), and quite a few of these will not come near Hokkaido, then I think he could make a pretty good guide from Hakodate Birding.
 
Well, having just counted the species on the website sidebar, it seems he could get about 240, quite a few of which are not easy to find (some pelagics, for example). Since there are about 550 Japanese species, but only about 350 to 400 'regulars' (that is, not accidentals, or exceptionally localised, but including regular every year offshore like at Hegura, for example), and quite a few of these will not come near Hokkaido, then I think he could make a pretty good guide from Hakodate Birding.

Next time I see Mark Brazil I'll have to ask him to write some text for me...................
 
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