Live camera
Cranes on the Izumi plain live camera — Izumi, Kagoshima
Reclaimed farmland where over ten thousand cranes winter. Between October and March the frame can fill with birds.
Sample August 2026What you are looking at
Rice paddies on reclaimed land. The calendar decides this camera completely: open it in winter and the frame is full of birds; open it in summer and it is a field.
The Izumi plain is the largest crane wintering ground in the world. More than ten thousand hooded and white-naped cranes arrive each year, and almost every hooded crane that comes to Japan gathers here. So much concentration in one place means a single outbreak of disease could take the lot, so there is ongoing work to spread them across more sites. The birds are designated a Special Natural Monument.
The paddies on this plain are reclaimed land, walled off from the sea in stages between the Edo period and the twentieth century. Grain left in the fields after harvest, and wide unbroken ground well away from houses, are what bring the cranes. Wardens count the arriving birds and record the numbers every year.
The cranes arrive around mid-October, peak in number from November through February, and head north again around March. Between April and September there is nothing here but a paddy field.
Time of day matters too. They scatter across the surrounding fields to feed during the day and return to the roost in the evening, so the flock reads as a flock in the morning and late in the day.
About this camera
| Place | Izumi, Kagoshima |
| Format | Still, hourly |
| Time zone | Asia/Tokyo (UTC+9) |
| Category | Nature · Wildlife |
| Operator | Ministry of the Environment — Internet Nature Institute |
| Terms of use | PDL 1.0 |
The operator's own page
The footage belongs to each agency. This site is an unofficial guide, and each sample frame was copied once per camera under that agency's terms of use.
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