Mark Brazil - The Japan Times

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Mark Brazil

Mark Brazil, a Briton based in Hokkaido, has written about the natural history of Japan in his Wild Watch column for over 30 years. After careers in conservation and natural history television, Mark taught for nine years at a university in Hokkaido before going freelance. He now travels the world as a lecturer and leader on wildlife-focused expeditions.

For Mark Brazil's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Aug 30, 2000

Feeling the pulse of the seasons

Recently, and for the first time, I flew right across Australia. Heading northwest from New Zealand, I crossed Australia's southeast coast somewhere south of Sydney and traversed the country northwest to the coast near Broome.

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Aug 16, 2000

Fat a question of feathers for shearwaters

The fact that young animals and birds not only start off small, but remain smaller than their parents for a long time, seems to be a dominant rule of life. Think of fox or badger cubs, think of young sparrows or bulbuls -- from birth, or hatching, and for some time after they remain smaller than their parents. The cygnets of the whooper swans that migrate to Japan each winter, though capable of the arduous migration, are still noticeably smaller than their parents six months after hatching, an age by which most small birds will be indistinguishable from their parents both in size and in plumage.

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Aug 2, 2000

Little terns face big problem

Graceful and agile in the air, the terns are the slender cousins of the gulls. Where the gulls typically lumber and flap, the terns flutter and dash. Terns may hover, and with the sun behind them, shining through their translucent wing feathers, they appear like tiny angels.

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Jul 19, 2000

Hats on where the seabirds nest

Wheesh! Crack! Something furious hit me on the back of the head.

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Jul 5, 2000

Migrants and vagrants under Teuri's crags

An hour and a half west of the small harbor town of Haboro, which is just three hours north of Sapporo, lie two small islands: Teuri and Yagishiri. Teuri is easy to visit and has fascinating seabird colonies and good walking. There is a ferry from Haboro, which goes via Yagishiri, and although there is a faster tourist boat that cuts the travel time by 30 minutes or so, the ferry is a more interesting ride.

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Jun 21, 2000

The little known giants of the Kalahari

The fine red sand of the Kalahari, dampened by the early morning dew, reveals the tracks of nocturnal and early morning wanderers. The heat of the rising sun soon turns the sand powder dry and the tracks blow away on the slightest breeze, but for those who are out early there are strange stories to be read in the sand.

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

May 31, 2000

A royal reserve of nature

It is a rare occasion, in a busy schedule, that allows me to spend a whole morning doing almost nothing, but this is one of those times. As I write, I am enjoying the sunshine and the view from the roof of a stone summer house. My sleeping quarters are down below, cool in the shade, but those I have abandoned in favor of the roof, for its view out across Junia Lake in India's Rajasthan Province.

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

May 17, 2000

Wild and free, within certain restrictions

"Wildlife," "natural," "wild" and "free" are terms that are loaded with meaning, redolent with atmosphere. They are words that may transport you mentally to the tundra, patrolled by polar bears, to the acacia-dotted African savanna across which herds of buffalo, gazelle, elephant and giraffe roam, or to the cathedral stillness of a Borneo rain forest, where gibbons hoot their dawn chorus and great orange apes move methodically in four-limbed brachiation. "Wildlife," "natural," "wild" and "free" are words that, for me, conjure up everything that is not tamed, domesticated, trapped or tethered by man.

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

May 2, 2000

Natural genki drink fuels aerial pollinators

For most of our planet's mind-numbingly long history of around 4.6 billion years, the most complex life form on Earth was the prokaryotic cell. The ghostly signatures of these simple cells without nuclei first appear in rocks dated to about 3.75 billion years ago. The length of their nearly 2-billion-year reign on Earth, though not their complexity, makes our own brief history seem as fleeting as the barely noticeable flicker of a neon light tube.

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Apr 19, 2000

Too harsh for humans, perfect for birds

Think of the automobile and which country comes to mind first? America, of course.

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Apr 5, 2000

Nemuro rolling down a road to nowhere

We may think of America as the land of the automobile, but for a place that both produces them and is constantly involved in road works for them, we need look no further than Japan.

ENVIRONMENT

Mar 29, 2000

Today amphibians, tomorrow maybe us?

Part 3 of a series

ENVIRONMENT

Mar 15, 2000

Wild animal tales -- with a pinch of salt

The image of wild animals visiting a salt lick is probably a familiar one to you if you are a regular watcher of television natural history documentaries. The scene is repeated over and over again, as large African or Indian mammals approach this particularly rich source of minerals.

ENVIRONMENT

Mar 1, 2000

Why ignore the canaries in the coal mine?

For all that the toads that I wrote about in this column a few weeks back have thick warty skins, amphibians in general are thin-skinned and very sensitive. That sensitivity is proving their undoing, and we should be paying much more attention to their demise than we are.

ENVIRONMENT

Feb 16, 2000

Rambling after migrating bramblings

The many seed-bearing plants of the temperate region, the grasses and the herbs, the trees and the shrubs, produce an enormous volume of seed each year. Typically of the natural world, a vast amount of effort is rewarded by very few successes. In the game of chance that is life, relatively few seeds survive to germinate, grow and ultimately replace the adult plants they were shed by.

ENVIRONMENT

Feb 2, 2000

Look out for masked bandits at roadside

It is amazing what one can see out of the corner of an eye.

ENVIRONMENT

Jan 19, 2000

Visit to Toad Hall: hip-hop as a way of life

I have a friend, an exceptional naturalist, who has traveled this country widely from Iriomote-jima to Hokkaido, yet who swears that he will never visit the Ogasawara Islands.

ENVIRONMENT

Jan 5, 2000

We are the walrus of the Chukchi Sea

An ethereal mist, hanging over the Chukchi Sea, lent a magical air to a seemingly endless expanse of broken sea ice making it difficult to judge sizes. A distant gull seemed huge; a dark lump on the edge of an ice floe seemed like a small stain on the snow -- at first. As the "World Discoverer" closed with the ice edge the "small stain" shifted size, the mistiness revealing it for a large seal, and not just any large seal, but the largest in the northern ocean -- a Pacific walrus.

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Dec 1, 1999

Built to last long winters of discontent

One of the most fascinating crossroads on earth lies to the northeast of Japan. The ancient Bering land bridge used to span the current Bering Straits, connecting the land masses of Siberia and Alaska into one vast continent and enabling a traffic of plants, animals and even people to exchange across the low-lying ground between Eurasia and North America.

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Nov 17, 1999

On the mystery of the mooses, or meese

One of the basic rules of biodiversity is that species diversity increases toward the tropics and decreases toward the poles.

From easily navigable train stations to the helpfulness of its municipal staff, Tokyo has earned high praise for its commitment to accessibility for disabled travelers.

[Rebroadcast] Japan is doing better on accessibility than you may think

Later this month, author Shogo Imamura will open Honmaru, a bookstore that allows other businesses to rent its shelves. It's part of a wave of ideas Japanese booksellers are trying to compete with online spaces.

The story isn't over for Japan's bookstores

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Prize winner Maki Imoto catches light with glass

Prize winner Maki Imoto catches light with glass

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