Takaji Takano's son Takeshi holds up a photo of his father, who played an important part in efforts to protect the Japanese crested ibis.

SADO, Niigata -- The Sado Japanese Crested Ibis Preservation Center on Sado Island, Niigata Prefecture, released Japanese crested ibises bred in captivity into the wild Thursday.

The crested ibises, or toki, had gone extinct in the wild in Japan, but have been bred in captivity for many years, by Takaji Takano, who died in 1997 at the age of 84, and others. Takano had dedicated himself to restoring the species, and the love that he had for the birds has been passed down to his son, Takeshi.

The Takano family used to have a house in an abandoned village in the Haetsubaki district in the southeastern part of the island, located in mountains that are a good two hours' walk from the foothills. No one lives there today, but there used to be a nesting ground for the crested ibises near their family home.

Takaji Takano saw 27 crested ibises at one time in terraced rice fields near his house during the autumn of 1941. After filling their stomachs with food from the rice fields, the birds would spread their wings and fly, and their orangeish pink color stood out brilliantly from the surrounding greenery.

"It was like the whole area was covered with blooming peonies," Takaji Takano used to say. He frequently praised the beauty of the birds, whose name can be written with the Chinese characters for vermilion and heron, to people he met.

His ancestors came to live in Haetsubaki around 350 years ago. The name of the district is said to come from the snow camellia tree, and during the winter the area saw snow accumulate to over one meter.

Takaji Takano returned to Sado after serving in China during the war, and dedicated three strips of his terraced rice fields near where he saw 27 crested ibises, as a place for raising food for them, such as loaches, small crabs, and mud snails. It was right after the end of the war so food was scarce, and his relatives criticized him for "having gone mad," But he did not mind, and simply said, "The crested ibises belong to my family. I will just have to forgo."

The crested ibises were eventually designated as special natural living monuments, and in 1967 the government established the Crested Ibis Preservation Center near Haetsubaki, and naturally asked Takaji Takano to join the center as a breeder.

The center aimed to capture all of the crested ibises in the wild, and to have them reproduce in captivity, but by 1987, all nine birds that had been in captivity over two decades had died, and not a single fledgling was hatched.

Takaji Takano kept a breeding diary that filled 10 notebooks, and scribbled other notes on stationery. His eldest son, Takeshi, 65, found these items, which reveal Takaji's inner struggles, while sifting through his belongings.

Takaji Takano had tried to preserve the crested ibises in his own rice paddies, but began to regret that he may have hurried their extinction by getting involved in the artificial breeding program, and was tormented by his inability to help the crested ibises as they died off.

After retiring from the preservation center around 1990, Takaji, while half paralyzed with illness, wrote a tanka, or 31-syllable poem, with his left hand from his sick bed.

On my wandering journey/My thoughts do not expire/Preserving the crested ibis/Strangers may know but cannot know, even now

Takaji wrote this poem down many times after he became a breeder at the center. But there was one line in the poem that changed over time. The line "My thoughts do not expire" had been "My thoughts are one."

Takeshi speculates on what his father had been thinking. "No matter what aspect of his involvement with the crested ibis he considered, he felt to the end that he did not understand the essence of why there had to be an effort to preserve the crested ibises. He may have felt that he was walking down a path that departed from his own feelings," says Takeshi.

Takeshi, who now carries on the wishes of his father as the head of the "Crested Ibis Wilderness Restoration Liaison Committee, visited Haetsubaki with me.

After the arching golden ears of rice disappear, rice paddies overgrown with vegetation come into view. We had come upon the place that Takaji had used to raise food for the crested ibises.

"As for what I inherited from my old man, it was those three strips of paddy land," said Takeshi. He continues to tend to the strips so that they will serve as a feeding ground for the crested ibises when they are restored to the wild.

There is one scene from his childhood that Takeshi would like to see again in Haetsubaki. He remembers that his father used to say, "Play inside the house because the crested ibises are here. And let them eat their food leisurely." After a while the crested ibises flew off and Takeshi and a friend would shout, "Come again tomorrow." As if answering them, the birds flew off, crying, "kaaahoon, kaaahoon."

These memories from when he was a child of five are a reminder of his father's deep love for the crested ibises.

The Japanese crested ibis (Nipponia Nippon), or toki, which have been designated as special natural living monuments, used to inhabit all parts of Japan. But they were recklessly hunted, and treated as harmful pests, so their population declined rapidly from the Meiji Era. In 1981, the five crested ibises that remained on Sado Island were captured, and an artificial reproduction program was attempted, but all died by 2003, marking the extinction of the native crested ibis. Around that time, Japan began to attempt to breed crested ibises from China, and is now raising some 120 crested ibises. On Thursday, the Sado Japanese Crested Ibis Preservation Center released a handful of the birds as part of its crested ibis restoration program.