Hyoko

Hyoko is a small irrigation pond dug in the Edo period that became, almost by accident, the place where wild swans in Japan learned to accept people. In 1950 a local man named Yoshikawa Shigeo began putting out feed and, after four years of the birds ignoring him, got them to come. It was the first successful wild swan feeding in Japan. The pond is now a Ramsar site and a national natural monument, and at the November peak roughly 5,000 swans cover the water.

The swans arrive in early October and stay until late March. Through the day most of them fly out to feed in the surrounding rice fields, so the pond fills at dawn and again at dusk. Feeding by hand happens three times a day in season and is done by a keeper the town still calls the swan uncle.