Photo/Illutration Children use a binocular and a telescope to count migrating swans in Hiranai, Aomori Prefecture, sometime around 1965. (Provided by the Hiranai municipal board of education)

Many Japanese no doubt harbor fond memories of their days at elementary school when they were asked to keep a diary of things like daily temperature change or the growth of morning glory seeds they had planted as homework during the summer vacation.

Compared with cutting-edge technologies such as genome editing and nanotechnology, the plain observation of objects just as they are may appear to lack a trendy, near-future feel, but they still amount to full-fledged scientific studies in their own right.

And some even make it into scientific articles that are published in academic journals of note.

Such was the case with the monitoring of the arrivals and departures of migrating swans undertaken for 55 years by successive generations of elementary school pupils in the town of Hiranai in Japan's northern Aomori Prefecture.

Yoshiyuki Tanaka, a professor of ecology with Hachinohe Institute of Technology, felt a huge surge of encouragement after he received an email from a scientist refereeing a research paper that he had coauthored. The reviewer was extolling the value of the children's swan monitoring records.

Hiranai’s coasts are so renowned as a migration ground for swans that the area was given “special natural monument” status by the central government in 1952 under the category of “The swans of Kominato and their migration ground.”

Pupils attending Asadokoro Elementary School, located nearby, began keeping records of the swans there in 1956.

They counted the number of swans, with distinctions made between adult and young birds, once in the morning and once in the afternoon almost daily from the time they arrived in autumn through the day the last bird departed sometime between March and June.

The pupils continued using a binocular and a telescope to keep records even when avian influenza spread in the 2000s. A total of 2,000 or so schoolchildren took part in the monitoring, which lasted until the elementary school closed in 2010.

Ten years later, a local conservation group decided to publish a brochure to commemorate the activity, which led to the material being incorporated into a scientific article.

Tanaka had learned that a colossal volume of records was kept in storage and thought they were sufficiently valuable to be published in an English-language science journal for the rest of the world to see.

An early manuscript of the article only covered an extract of the available data, but the referee who extolled the value of the records called for everything to be published.

Members of the conservation group helped with the work for inputting reams of handwritten records into personal computers.

The paper was published in February in Data in Brief, a science journal.

“This valuable data could not have been produced without the continuous efforts of all the elementary school students and teachers who participated in the monitoring,” the article says in its Acknowledgments section.

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