Hokkaido: The White World

Ten days move across Hokkaido’s winter wilderness to bring together three of Japan’s most celebrated wildlife spectacles in a single circuit: the hot-spring snow monkeys of Jigokudani, the courtship dance of the red-crowned crane at Kushiro, and the drift-ice gathering of Steller’s sea eagles off Rausu. It’s the fullest possible introduction to Hokkaido’s winter, trading a narrow single-species focus for the breadth of the island’s best-known cold-season wildlife.

The trip opens at Jigokudani, where Japanese macaques – the famous “snow monkeys” – wade into steaming hot-spring pools to escape the cold, offering two full days of close, ambient portraits against rising steam and falling snow. From there the circuit moves east to the Kushiro marshes, spending a full day and more among red-crowned cranes as they perform their bowing, mirrored courtship displays across the ice – one of the most photographed rituals in Japanese wildlife photography, and a species that came close to extinction before a decades-long winter feeding programme brought it back.

The final stretch transfers north to Rausu and the Shiretoko coast for repeated boat trips out onto the drift ice, where Steller’s sea eagles – the heaviest eagles on the planet – gather over the pack ice in numbers found almost nowhere else on earth, with an afternoon in Notsuke reserved for the red foxes that hunt across its wind-sculpted dunes. Two further eagle outings on the final days make the most of shifting ice and light before the return to Tokyo.

Expect deep winter cold throughout – temperatures can fall to −30°C with biting coastal winds – so serious cold-weather gear isn’t optional. The trip runs in February, timed to peak crane activity and the thickest drift ice of the Hokkaido winter.