Wings, Ice and Silence

I’ll be honest with you: I am not an animal photographer. Landscapes and cityscapes — that’s my world. But that is exactly why I am here, standing in the frozen stillness of Hokkaido in the middle of winter, camera in hand, completely out of my comfort zone.

There’s something else I should tell you, while we’re being honest.

I am afraid of birds.

Not mildly uncomfortable. Not a little squeamish. Genuinely, irrationally, stubbornly afraid of them. The flapping, the unpredictability, the way they move without warning. So signing up for a wildlife workshop in Japan — one focused specifically on birds — was either an act of great courage or spectacular poor judgment. Possibly both.

The first couple of days are a gift. We shoot minimal landscapes, and I am in my element. Hokkaido in winter is breathtaking — snow-covered hills, frozen fields, skies that shift between silver and pale gold. I feel confident. Capable. I remember why I love photography.

I try not to think about what comes next…

The alarm goes off at an hour that shouldn’t exist. It is dark, it is brutally cold, and I haven’t eaten — there was no time for breakfast, and right now my stomach has opinions about that. Every reasonable part of me questions every decision that led to this moment. We drive in silence through the frozen Hokkaido morning, headlights cutting through blackness, arriving at the lake before the world has properly woken up.

Before sunrise. Before coffee. Before anything resembling comfort.

We set up in the dark, fingers already stiff inside gloves that are not quite warm enough. The lake is barely visible — just shapes and mist. And silence. Complete, total silence. The trumpeter swans are still asleep, and there is something almost sacred about being in their presence before they know you are there. We move carefully, quietly, as if we are guests in a place we were not exactly invited.

We wait. Hungry, frozen, and waiting.

And then the sun begins to rise.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. It seeps into the fog slowly, like light learning how to exist — soft and diffuse at first, then gradually amber, then gold. The mist doesn’t burn away. It glows. And the swans begin to emerge from it in stages — first silhouettes, then shapes, then these magnificent white birds materialising out of light itself, stirring gently as the morning finds them.

I forget to be cold. I forget to be hungry. I forget to be afraid.

There is no other way to say it. The scene in front of me is so quietly extraordinary that everything else — the empty stomach, the frozen fingers, the ungodly hour — simply falls away. The sun rises directly into the fog, onto the swans, and their white feathers catch that gold and hold it — luminous, almost impossible. The whole world is soft. Hushed. Held.

Every now and then one will start trumpeting and then rise up and beat its wings with sudden, startling force — that sound shattering the stillness completely. My heart rate spikes. But I no longer step back.

I press the shutter.

This is why you get up before the sun. This is why you skip breakfast and drive through the dark and stand in the cold until your toes go numb. You would do it all again tomorrow without a second thought.

—to be continued—