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Three days with whooper swans on frozen Lake Kussharo
After our days with the cranes, we headed further north into the island’s interior where geologically recent volcanic activity produced a wealth of hot springs landscapes. Our wildlife photography on the shoreline of Lake Kussharo centered around the thermal water along the lake’s mist-shrouded edges. Almost all the lake freezes over in winter, but open leads around the hot springs attract hundreds of whooper swans that make their annual journey to the lake’s open leads from tundra and taiga lands further north in Siberia.
In contrast to our previous time with the red-crowned cranes, Lake Kussharo offered great potential for environmental photography capturing the birds within the landscape. Whereas the cranes gathered in open, bare fields, limiting the subject matter essentially to the birds themselves, I found numerous compositions juxtaposing the whooper swans in steam, snow and mist, set against the frozen lake and distant mountains.
