Captive breeding of Oriental white storks started in 1965. In 1971, the stork population breeding in the wild became extinct in Japan. Thereafter, only a few storks migrated to Japan from overseas. Captive breeding was unsuccessful for a long time. This park’s predecessor, the Oriental White Stork Captive Breeding Center, finally succeeded in breeding storks in captivity in 1989, after 25 years of trying. Captive breeding succeeded every year since then. In recent years, we have been pursuing planned, genetic diversification by maintaining multiple pairings of storks.
The park’s public-viewing cage is where you can see Oriental white storks being raised by the park. They are only a small number of the park’s total storks. In the park’s non-public areas (“backyard”), we have various cages for breeding, habituating, and stork raising. We raise pairs of breeding storks, prepare storks to be released in the wild, train storks to acquire social skills, and raise storks. The storks are therefore kept in different cages for different purposes.