China – not a good place to be a bird…or a birder

From The Economist comes this rather disturbing story by Zhoushan entitled The Loneliness of the Chinese Birdwatcher. Zhoushan notes that:

China is not a good place to be a bird. I learnt this when I moved from Hong Kong, still a British colony, to Beijing. Though my home in Hong Kong was in the heart of the city, dense scrub tumbled down the slopes from the Peak. I was driven out of bed every morning by a raucous dawn chorus. The violet whistling thrush was among the first to start up, and the hwamei (”beautiful eyebrow”), with white eyestripe and rich territorial song. The koel, a tropical cuckoo that lurks in thick cover, has a rising bisyllabic wolf-whistle. The grey treepie, a corvid, was a late riser, but hoodlum gangs soon made up for it. Layered over the top of all this came the screeches of sulphur-crested cockatoos. These aerial zoomers were a feral flock.

Whereas on Hainan island, in the Gulf of Tonkin in China’s south-east, birds are dinner served up by the Li people, a Chinese minority group:

The Li men jostle to sell me supper, all of it live: white-breasted waterhens, little egrets, a black-crowned night heron and a spot-billed duck, the only duck where male and female look alike. Upright, herons and their egret cousins have the gaunt, hunched air of sharp-eyed spinsters dressed for an Edwardian salon. Hung upside down, they turn limp, resigned to their fate except for the occasional mild jab at their captor’s hand.

Zhoushan has some very interesting things to say about the role of birds in Chinese society, much of it at odds with the popular, but apparently misconceived notion that wild birds are treated with the same reverence in Chinese society that they are accorded in Japan and some other Asian cultures.

In China, birds have seemingly been overwhelmed, like much of nature, by the demands of a rapidly growing and enriched society and the economic imperative.

Zhoushan refers to one early example of birds getting in the way of ‘progress’ and the likely effects of misguided policies:

In 1958 Mao Zedong had declared war on songbirds, sparrows in particular: he claimed they consumed scarce grain. For three days and nights my neighbourhood, gripped like much of northern China by hysteria, had beaten pots and pans to keep birds on the move until they collapsed in exhaustion on the roofs and pavements of the courtyard houses. The consequence was a plague of locusts the next year that helped bring on a famine. “Suan le,” Mao had said when told that the anti-sparrow campaign was not working. “Forget it then.”

Four decades after the campaign, sparrows remained scarcer in Beijing than they should have been (though they could reliably be found being grilled on bamboo skewers in the night markets, along with yellow-breasted buntings, meltingly sweet, in autumn).

China does not have a strong tradition of birdwatching and ornithological research – a disappointment in a country roughly the size of the continental USA and with a bewildering array of habitats and unmatched geographic and zoological diversity.

China is high on the ‘wish’ list of the world birdwatcher’s scale of countries to visit – with over 1,300 bird species and relatively high endemicity the country presents as a tantalising, but difficult, destination.

Fatbirder (don’t ask!) is a site dedicated to birders across the globe and the Fatbirder page dedicated to Chinese birding reflects the relatively low volume of birding travel to that country and interest in the study of bird within China. Fatbirder notes that:

Unfortunately, the pressure imposed by the huge population spells bad news for the wildlife; apparently nearly 8% of the country is set-aside as reserves, but this does not mean the areas are protected. Logging and hunting persist, the waterways are polluted beyond belief and much of the northeast is under threat of desertification as a result of merciless deforestation in the north. The government in Beijing has firm plans to do all it can to extend the protection of wildlife, but the recovery will be slow, and quite probably too late for some of the countries more vulnerable endemics.

If the possibility of amazing birds encourages you to get on a plane and discover the wonders yourself, the logistics of travel have to be considered. Even in the largest cities of Beijing and Shanghai, very little English is spoken, and once you are out in the countryside, a shouted “hello” is about all you will get. The prices for foreigners are often inflated, so be prepared to haggle, and even though the freedom of movement has improved tremendously in the last decade, some hostility and bureaucracy may still be experienced in more remote areas.

And while China seems, and is, a long way from Australia geographically, culturally and ornithologically, there are some very good reasons why Australian’s should be concerned about the fate of China’s birds and birding habitats in China and the rest of east Asia, particularly along the coasts.

The east-Asian – Australasian Flyway is a glorious thing – each year millions of shorebirds leave their breeding grounds in the Siberian and Russian Arctic and travel a precarious route along the coasts of east Asia, through south-east Asia and make landfall in northern Australia and beyond – later to disperse across the continent to a place near most of the readers of this post in Australia’s south-east.

As Wikipedia notes:

The East Asian – Australasian Flyway is one of the world’s great flyways. At its northernmost it stretches eastwards from the Taimyr Peninsula in Russia to Alaska. Its southern end encompasses Australia and New Zealand. Between these extremes the Flyway covers much of eastern Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, South-East Asia and the western Pacific. It is especially important for the millions of migratory waders or shorebirds that breed in northern Asia and Alaska and spend the non-breeding season in South-East Asia and Australasia. In total, the flyway passes through 22 countries with approximately 55 migratory species travelling along it, equating to about 5 million birds.

There are very real threats to the integrity of the east Asian – Australasian flyway – and they aren’t all in the countries to our north. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of governments here many of our wetlands have been, or are being, seriously degraded by poor agricultural practices and government policies that elevate the economic over the environmental.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in our greatest river system, the Murray-Darling – where many of what were semi-permanent wetlands are now dead or dying – their regular waters sucked away for paddocks and enpondments and their floodwater diverted for irrigation. For too many years in recent decades our visitors from the north have found the wetlands they have traditionalyy used for their necessary roosting and recharging en-route to and from Australia have been reduced to dust and dead trees.