Kasumigaura Bird Rescue Meeting: Feb 28
There will be a Kasumigaura Bird Rescue meeting on Thursday, February 28 from 8:45pm at Hot Stuff. Avi and Maurice will both be there to discuss this problem and look for solutions.
To find out more about the Kasumigaura Bird Rescue operation, please click on the following links.
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Kasumigaura Bird Rescue Needs Your Help More Than Ever As Migrators Pass Through En Masse And Tsuchiura City Approves Funding For MORE Deadly Nets
A Bird In Hand
Since Tsukublog first let the world know about how large numbers of wild birds were regularly getting entangled, and slowly starving to death in government funded agricultural nets on the shores of Lake Kasumigaura, concerned residents, both Japanese and foreign, have been making heroic efforts, coming from afar and slogging through waist deep muck (often covered with a layer of ice!) in all sorts of harsh weather conditions, in order to free as many birds as possible from their pitiful state of SUSPENDED ANIMATION. At the same time, efforts have been made to lobby the prefectural government, and get them to stop subsidizing these deadly and INEFFECTIVE nets, or better yet- order them to be taken down.
After 2 years of struggling, we believed that we had been making some progress. The story has appeared several times in the local Japanese press, slightly damaging the lotus producers public image , and the nets themselves have been getting older and all tattered. It seemed to us that some of the farmers were taking the nets down, and without government money, would not be putting new ones up. The prefectural government in Mito also seemed to be very receptive to our appeals. We thought we were seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
Is Better Than A Handful In the Nets!
How wrong we were! While Ibaraki Prefecture will NOT allot money for further net subsidies, we found out indirectly, from an article in a local Japanese paper, that Tsuchiura City WILL BE giving NOKYO and the net companies a whole lot of money for ALL NEW NETS. We felt like we were sucker punched when we got the news. And this happened right in the heart of the migration season, when thousands of birds, mostly teals,coots and moorhens, but sometimes owls and hawks, need our help!
Why cant Tsuchiura City even LOOK INTO the possibility of cheaper, more effective ways of protecting the lotus fields (and do the birds REALLY do so much damage?). When asked, they say that they can ONLY subsidize nets!
I believe that if the general Japanese public becomes aware of what is going on, Tsuchiura City will HAVE TO order the nets be taken down. Till now they have been doing a good job of keeping things hushed as the story has not been fairly reported in any major periodical. Local journalists have told me that they have been pressured NOT to write about this topic, and when they do, the UNDOCUMENTED claims of huge damage caused by birds takes precedence. These articles do not question why such large sums of money were given to net companies without there having been any data available on their effectivenenss.They do not mention that there are alternative ways of keeping birds away from the fields. I will also go as far as to say that even if the birds did cause severe damage it would not justify the use of these nets which indiscriminately entangle numerous species, many which could never be suspected of eating lotus roots(including protected species).
If you would like to help with bird rescue or lobbying against the nets, or if you have any good advise, please contact us.
For more details and pictures read the other postings in Tsukublogs Kasumigaura Bird Rescue category.
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Save the Birds
In May 2007, Avi Landau wrote an article for Alien Times about how birds are being trapped in nets at Lake Kasumigaura and left to die. After he wrote that article, he discussed the problem with the city and received some assurances that something would be done about the situation. It is now more than half a year later and when Avi visited the lake yesterday, he found that nothing has been done. Beautiful owls, hawks, egrets, and herons are stuck in the nets and have been left to die there.
Avi needs the Tsukuba community to help him bring this issue to the attention of people who can do something about it. Here are some ideas of what you might be able to do to help.
- Go with Avi to take pictures of the birds stuck in the nets so that they can be used to demonstrate the problem to city officials.
- Translate documents into Japanese so that they can be distributed to the public.
- Contact people who work for the media (newspapers, television, etc.) and ask them to feature the story so more attention can be brought to this issue.
- Anything else you can think of!
If you are able to help, please contact Avi Landau at avi[AT]tora.email.ne.jp. This is an urgent problem as a huge number of birds are trapped and dying as you read this message.
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Still Caught Up In Kasumigaura Bird Rescue
There have certainly been some changes for the better since we started to let people know what was going on in the lotus root growing areas around Lake Kasumigaura -- that countless wild birds of all sorts were dying slow deaths after getting entangled in nets set up around the fields.
Clearly, many of the nets have come down, and many of those that remain have tended to be more carefully managed. By this I mean that the sides of these canopy-like nets are properly kept closed so that wading birds cannot just wander inside them.
For the past several months, Maurice Gillis and I have been monitoring the situation and had been relieved to find that the number of birds that needed to be rescued had been considerably smaller than what it had been in the past.
Then came December. The farmers have harvested most of their lotus roots and their pondlike fields lay all cleared of vegetation, creating what are obviously attractive frolicking grounds for the various coots and ducks who are passing through as part of their seasonal migration. Unfortunately, the farmers, who must surely be happy to have gotten the harvest over with, have left their nets as they were, or completely untended, leaving this area a DEATH TRAP for these birds. I found more than 30 entangled in one field, and there are many more netted fields.
This is especially upsetting since the fields are empty of any crops and the birds (which the net companies suggest cause damage to lotus root!) CANNOT POSSIBLY BE DOING ANY HARM AT ALL.
I was also actually able to observe for the first time how the birds actually fly into the fields THROUGH the nets, proving that the particular ones being used are not effective AT ALL in keeping birds out, and that the tax-payers of Tsuchiura have been scammed out of millions of dollars by a dubious deal between city officials and the netmaker.
If you would like to join in on our rescue efforts,which involves wading (in special suits) through the icy fields and untangling mostly ducks and coots before releasing them into the lake, please contact me.
We also need more people to know about this UNACCEPTABLE situation. Spread the word.
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Tsukuba`s Popular Mascot- The Owl – does not get much love in REAL LIFE ( Owls in Japanese history and culture )
By Avi Landau
In modern Japan, it is common for people to possess an owl of some sort. Not a real-live one, of course, but perhaps a figurine, doll, painting, stuffed animal or even just a cartoon image of these instantly recognizable, flat faced birds. In fact at the library, I found a whole book dedicated exclusively to the different owl-shaped folk figurines produced in the various regions of Japan. These owls are usually kept at home, but I personally know several Japanese who ALWAYS carry little owl figures with them, in the same manner as I remember how some Americans always have a rabbit’s foot in their pocket.
The reason for this can be found in the Japanese name for OWL – FUKURO （フクロウ or 梟) – which can also be written with different KANJI CHARACTERS that give it a LUCKY significance. FUKURO can be written as 福来郎 （福: fuku, LUCK; 来: kuru, comes; 郎: ro, suffix for a boy’s name), meaning LUCK COMES, or as 不苦労 (不: fu, no; 苦労: kurou, hardship), meaning NO HARDSHIP OR SUFFERING. This type of word play which can make the names of objects either auspicious, or inauspicious is called GORO AWASE (語呂合わせ), and in this way, owls have come to be one of the more popular motifs for ENGI MONO, or lucky charms, and those who are interested can find in certain books or magazines, detailed explanations of how owl figurines of various shapes, sizes, and colors have different types of luck-bringing power.
Those of us living in Tsukuba have an even more than usual exposure to owl images, as FUKURO are the official bird and mascot of the city. Owl characters adorn an assortment of city-owned property including the library computer on which I am writing these words. Also, the people who brought us the TX train line commissioned, at great expense, several stone OWL SCULPTURES which were placed in Tsukuba’s Central Park (CHUO KOEN), between the police station and the ARS LIBRARY. This was not an original idea, however (few things in Tsukuba are original — our festival is borrowed from Aomori City and we could go so far as to say that the whole idea of creating a science city here was in imitation of the Soviet Union’s Akadem Gorodok), as it appears to be a mere copy of the owls which can be seen decorating one of Japan’s most famous and busiest train stations, Ikebukuro. (Get it? IKE-FUKURO!)
For Westerners, it is not surprising that the owl was chosen to be the official bird of our academically oriented city, as for us, it is the familiar symbol of wisdom. Since the Meiji Period (beginning in 1868) the Japanese, too, have adopted this view of owls being the philosophers of the forest, and the symbol of knowledge and technology. This notion gradually evolved in Europe because of the bird’s association with the Greek goddess Athena, who as the protector of Athens went from being an agricultural goddess (owls eat plenty of mice!), to goddess of war and eventually to being associated with the learning and arts which thrived in her great city.
Before Japan opened up to the West, letting in this new symbolic significance for owls, it was classical Chinese texts, which described these nocturnal birds as bad omens or even evil creatures (at one point in Chinese history owls were nailed ALIVE to trees on the summer solstice day, because it was said that they ate their parents and were thus highly unfilial birds!) that influenced how the Japanese viewed them. Being mysterious creatures of the night, whose calls were often loud and frightening, reinforced this negative image.
At best, the owls were believed to be predictors of the weather, and a look at any encyclopedia of Japanese folk beliefs will show how various conflicting interpretations of the owls hooting developed in different parts of Japan in relation to the next day’s weather. Anyway, these beliefs are now mostly a thing of the past as the Western view of the owl has taken firm hold.
Another reason for the owl having been selected as Tsukuba’s official bird cannot be easily guessed anymore. The once abundant forests, which provided shelter and nesting possibilities, and the many wide open turf-grass fields, which make perfect hunting grounds (owls love mice and moles) made Tsukuba an IDEAL PLACE for owls to make their home.
Still in my neighborhood of KONDA, we can be awakened at night by the hooting and screeching of owls, and we can often seen them waiting for a meal or a mate, in the twilight, on utility poles and telephone wires.
In other parts of Tsukuba and Ibaraki, things have not been good for our official bird. Rampant destruction of our woods and what seems like the systematic targeting for elimination of any greenery, has sent surviving owls off to look for new homes. Unfortunate refugees might end up in Tsuchiura where they will very likely get caught in the deadly nets around Kasumigaura.
Maurice Gilis, who lives in Iwama, recently found a large Ural Owl, horribly entangled, which died a humiliating upside-down death. We have been reporting the danger of these useless nets for more than a year, but it appears that officials (and most other people) DON’T GIVE A HOOT.
It won’t be long before our mascot and official bird will exist only in figurine and cartoon form, in this place where, until just a few years ago, it thrived.
I guess the owl is not REALLY a very lucky bird after all.
One of the owl nesting boxes set up in Kamizakai ( Nakane kondadai) in Tsukuba. This is very nice for the owls, but unfortunately were probably put up to drive the local goshawks (O-Taka) away
(one ironic development in relation to this story is that the people who are trying get a road built through certain woods which local residents are trying to protect ( the developers want a nice road which goes straight from their housing complex to Tsukuba Center- to make their real estate more valuable- while activists want to protect the nesting area of goshawks and other birds) have been pushing the idea of creating a FUKURO NO MORI ( Owl woods), and have actually put up some nest boxes which they hope that owls will set up home in.
The only problem is that what seems to be their real motive is to keep the goshawks from nesting where they usually do- so that there will be fewer obstacles ( such as rare and protected birds) to getting the go-ahead for their plan! Owls sometimes prey on goshawk chicks, so natuarally, the hawks try to stay clear of the owls` territory.)
I`ve also written this about what to do if you find an injured bird in Tsukuba:
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